The offseason has already gotten off to a noteworthy start for the Blue Jackets, who announced Thursday that head coach Rick Bowness will return for the 2026-27 season.
President of hockey operations and general manager Don Waddell will have a busy few months ahead, but one of the biggest things on his plate is now taken care of. Now he has to attack a bevy of contracts that need signed, prepare for the draft, and look at which players may be available in free agency and on the trade market to improve a team that fell just shy of the playoffs for a second straight season.
So what to make of a disappointing end of the season, as well as where things might go from here now that Bowness remains in the fold? Here’s three takeaways about the start of the Blue Jackets offseason.
The Players Wanted Rick Bowness
As the Blue Jackets packed their bags, said goodbyes and got ready to return home for the summer, there was one order of business that seemingly had to be attended to, and that was the status of Bowness.
As Waddell noted, his exit interviews with players – conducted separate from Bowness, to ensure honesty, or at least to avoid a player being afraid to speak candidly – revealed a consensus.
The Blue Jackets wanted Bowness back.
Defenseman Damon Severson called him “the best coach I’ve personally ever had,” while the rest of the CBJ players spoke about how much they appreciated both Bowness’ passion and the attention to detail he brought as a coach. So it’s not hard to surmise that the coach’s return was met with excitement in the locker room.
“I think he’s an excellent coach,” Mason Marchment said. “He came in and really put a good structure around this team, and it’s just too bad with the injuries and stuff like that, not being able to get it done, but especially for him coming out of retirement. We all want to win for him. ... He’s a great person, a great coach, and he cares. He really does.”
“I love Bones,” center Adam Fantilli added before the announcement was made. “He’s done a lot for me, and I appreciate it. If he’s back, I’ll be really excited to get started again with him.”
We could keep going, as Waddell said “to a man” the Blue Jackets players told him that they hoped the coach returned for the 2026-27 season. That’s perhaps not a huge surprise considering the team posted a 21-11-5 record under the longest-tenured head or assistant coach in NHL history.
The Blue Jackets made major strides defensively under Bowness, going from allowing 3.38 goals per game – 28th in the NHL – before the coaching change to fourth in the league at 2.68 per game. His ability to get the team to play a high-tempo, structured game was one of the biggest reasons for the team’s turnaround from last place in the Eastern Conference to one that was in the playoff race until the final days.
In addition, the coach earned rave reviews almost immediately for the relationships he built with his players, born from daily locker room chats and check-ins with players on the ice before practice. That authentic nature also came through with the media when Bowness made his now-famous quotes after the regular-season finale, but many players saw it as an example of the fire to win he brings on a daily basis.
“He’s very passionate,” Charlie Coyle said. “You want to play for a guy like that. Was it a bit warranted? Yeah, of course it was. He’s a guy who I’ve loved playing for, still love playing for, and he cares so much. You can tell it in the way he talked and spoke. Was he emotional? Of course he was. But we’re all disappointed. We all feel some of those emotions.
“At the end of the day, I just saw a guy who cares so much and wants to better this team and everything around it, so I can’t really complain about that.”
What To Learn From Season’s End
The biggest question that will haunt the Blue Jackets during the summer months will be what happened during the 2-8-1 finish the season, and you can come up with several reasons for the swoon.
Injuries to Mathieu Olivier (the team’s best forechecker and an identity player who was a third of the team’s best two-way forward line), Severson (a puck-moving defenseman who settled in nicely on Werenski’s right) and Dmitri Voronkov (a netfront force who could have helped the offense down the stretch) were certainly factors.
Perhaps a team that played 26 games in the last 48 days ran out of gas, or at least didn’t have enough time to regain its bearings once things got off kilter in the race to the finish. Struggles on special teams (the power play was at 11.1 percent, the penalty kill at 61.5) and in the third period (Columbus was outscored 19-4) also couldn’t be overcome during the last 11 games.
And one of the biggest issues might have been good, old-fashioned bad puck luck when it came to finishing scoring chances. According to Natural Stat Trick, the Blue Jackets created 33.95 expected goals – a measure of shot quantity and quality – in the last 11 games but scored just 21 times.
“The biggest issue we had in a couple of those tough games wasn’t how we played, we were just unable to finish,” Bowness said. “The puck just wasn’t going in. A couple of games, like the Winnipeg game and the game in Carolina, we did absolutely nothing offensively so there’s no reason for the puck to go in. But other than that, the analytics, when we started to get those chances and shots back up, they were there where they were earlier. And the difference was the puck just didn’t go in.”
There might have been another factor at play, as well. A couple of the veteran players noted in their exit interviews that as focused on the day-to-day grind as the Blue Jackets were when Bowness took over, they might have lost a little bit of that sharpness as they worried about playoff positioning in the final weeks.
“When Bones took over, it’s not like we told ourselves, ‘Hey, we have to win 25 of the next 30-whatever games to make the playoffs,’” defenseman Zach Werenski said. “We just focused on the process, focused on how we had to play and we frustrated teams and we played our game. The only thing that mattered was the game in front of us.
“I feel like the last few weeks, it’s human nature. Everyone starts talking about playoffs and percentages and chances, and maybe you forget about the next game and the process and what’s in front of you. I think it’s for all the right reasons. We all wanted to be in a playoff spot and get that ‘X’ next to our name. I feel like it disconnected our group a little bit in terms of on-ice play.”
Erik Gudbranson added the difference was noticeable between being the hunters, as the Blue Jackets were at the end of the season a year ago, and the hunted this time around. While no one wants to sit here and talk about learning experiences after six straight years out of the postseason – they'd rather be playing playoff hockey at the moment – there is something to be said about having to find out what it truly takes before knowing how to do it.
“We just have to keep playing and stick to the process,” Olivier said. “I think we might have strayed away from that a little bit, and that’s what hurt us in the end.”
Taking The Next Step
We now know Bowness will be back, but things aren't about to get any easier for Waddell.
Eight players who spent time with the Blue Jackets this year – captain Boone Jenner, alternate captain Gudbranson, Coyle, Marchment, Danton Heinen, Zach Aston-Reese, Brendan Gaunce and Brendan Smith – are set to become unrestricted free agents. Waddell also must sign restricted free agents Fantilli, Cole Sillinger, Jet Greaves and Egor Zamula.
That’s a hefty task before Waddell even considers changes he hopes to make to the roster, but we’ll get into that part tomorrow. The biggest thing that the Blue Jackets discussed on their way out was “learning how to win,” a topic that was a hot-button issue given the way the season ended and Bowness’ postgame comments Tuesday.
In many ways, the head coach seemed like he was delivering a message and setting a tone right away for the upcoming season, and now he’ll have the chance to pick up right where he left off when the team reassembles in September.
“They’re good guys,” Bowness said. “They are. They’re a tight group. They care about each other. But now when I go after them in October and November, I can tell them, ‘You can’t do this in March and April like we talked about last year.’ If we’re going through a tough spell and I’m trying to tell them, ‘You can’t do this, you’re not gonna get away with it in the playoffs,’ now I have a reference point to them.”
Looking back at the whole of the 2025-26 season, the Blue Jackets did a lot of good things, including increasing their point total for the fourth consecutive season. Two of the team’s lines became dependable forces, Werenski turned in a Norris Trophy-caliber campaign, and several other players stepped up to help the team become the hottest squad in the NHL at one point. Columbus led the fourth most minutes during games of any team in the league, showing the squad was right there.
But the Blue Jackets cost themselves too many points with a slow start, a tough finish, inconsistent special teams and far too many third-period leads lost. Next year will be about taking the next step, and the lessons of where this season went wrong will have to be learned from the drop of the first puck.
“You have to grind every game, and we did so many good things this year getting leads,” Severson said. “You can’t just sit back. You have to go push for that next goal. You don’t have to do anything crazy. You don’t have to worry about guys putting up numbers or anything. Everybody is gonna be so much happier and we’re gonna be so much better off as a team if at the end of the night we’re celebrating a win.
“It’s a process we have to learn, but we have a lot of guys in here I firmly believe are gonna be part of the solution, and it’s only up for us going forward. It’s obviously been a tough couple years, but we look forward to hopefully turning that narrative around next year.”
