Rick Bowness's All-Time Postgame Rant

Rich doesn't spend a lot of time on Columbus hockey. He made an exception for this one. Blue Jackets interim head coach Rick Bowness just watched his team drop its sixth straight home game to close the season, eliminated from playoff contention, and walked into the postgame podium with nothing to lose and no filter to apply.

Bowness is 71 years old. He's an interim coach who might want the permanent job. Instead of pitching himself, he used the podium to lay out exactly what he thinks is broken, and exactly how he'd fix it if he came back.

The stat line that set him off: three hits, 23 giveaways. He came back to those numbers twice. Three hits, 23 giveaways. What else you want to know.

"I don't know if I'm back," Bowness said, "but if I'm back, I'm changing this culture. These guys, they don't care. Losing is not important enough to them."

He pointed to the Olympic break as the inflection point. Everything was fine while it was easy. The moment it got hard, the team stopped competing. He told his players directly after the game that if he returns, the culture changes.

Asked if the players should be embarrassed, he said yes. If they weren't, they were on the wrong team. Asked if he wanted to be back, he said he'd scratched the itch and he and president of hockey operations Don Waddell would talk.

He also dropped the line of the night. Some of these guys are so lucky the season's over and there's no practice tomorrow.

Rich breaks down why the rant hits all the marks of a great postgame eruption, emotional, directed, specific, zero Fs left in the bag, and the coach actively directing the press conference traffic by asking reporters what else they wanted to know. It's a coach who cares yelling at the void because his players apparently don't.

The Blue Jackets don't appear in the existing team list, so Rich treats this as a rare hockey visit rather than a recurring beat. But Bowness earned the minutes. Canadian pulling no punches about Canadian players on a Canadian holiday called effort.