Adam Lowry, Rick Bowness and the special Game 7 moment that was years in the making

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Adam Lowry’s voice broke when he heard Rick Bowness’ voice on the other end of the line.

Speaking on TNT after scoring the Game 7 winning goal in double-overtime, Lowry appeared surprised to hear the voice of the head coach who made him captain.

“Listen: That’s why you’re captain,” Bowness told Lowry. “That effort and that gutsy effort from that team tonight personifies you.”

“I love you” ❤️

What a moment between Adam Lowry and Coach Bowness on the postgame 🥹 pic.twitter.com/qS4hGtY8Na

— NHLonTNT (@NHL_On_TNT) May 5, 2025

Lowry’s emotion is obvious in the video. Winnipeg’s Game 7 win — and Bowness’ message along with it — were years in the making. Lowry’s heart-and-soul effort indeed personifies the Jets. Winnipeg’s team is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a collection of players who want to play for Winnipeg and for each other. Lowry’s leadership as captain has helped more of his teammates feel like their best selves.

To hear it from Bowness directly clearly made Lowry emotional.

“He said, ‘You’re going to bring a tear to my eye,’” Bowness told The Athletic on Monday. “Well, we both did.”

Bowness is retired now. His former associate coach, Scott Arniel, now gets to enjoy the impact of Lowry’s leadership. But this story starts a little over three years ago, in December 2021, with a shocking departure. Three seasons ago, there was no chance that Lowry could have been named captain at all.

Winnipeg’s players didn’t get advance warning when Paul Maurice abruptly resigned on Dec. 17, 2021. The Jets were only three points outside a playoff spot and the expectation on the outside was that they should be able to put together the kind of run that erased their slow start.

But Maurice kept his departure closely guarded such that even Lowry was left in the dark — even though his dad, Dave Lowry, was on Winnipeg’s staff as an assistant coach. On the day Maurice resigned, the Jets promoted Dave Lowry to take over in his absence. It put immediate strain on the relationship between father and son.

“Like, you couldn’t have told me or given me a heads up?” Adam Lowry remembers thinking. “This is a pretty big deal. And it’s not that I’m not ecstatic for my dad’s opportunity but, one, we were stunned that Paul was leaving. Two, this changed the whole dynamic of the player/coach relationship that we had at the rink.”

Assistants tend to be the “players’ coaches” of an NHL coaching staff. The head coach plays the role of disciplinarian, doling out ice time and making lineup decisions. When players are upset, their ire is usually directed at the head coach — and that worked out fine for the Lowrys before Maurice resigned. There was a change in the Jets’ dressing room when Dave Lowry took over.

“It was hard for my teammates. I think, for the most part, they handled it really well. People said it was hard to vent or talk about the coaches — and that’s a common thing. Sometimes people get fed up and venting is a natural reaction but, certainly, they were cognizant of how I might view these things or if I might change my perception on how I view them,” Lowry said.

It added an awkward dynamic to a team that was already well-known for internal disagreements. The 2021-22 Jets were well-stocked with talent but didn’t see eye-to-eye about a lot of things. There were cultural issues created in part by ex-captain Blake Wheeler’s old-school, top-down approach, in part by Maurice’s inability to address those issues, and in part by players — PL Dubois, most famously — who simply did not want to play in Winnipeg.

There’s no way that version of the Winnipeg Jets, with Dave Lowry as head coach, could have made Lowry the captain he is now — even if Wheeler hadn’t occupied the role.

“There would have been no chance,” Dave Lowry told The Athletic. “One of the hardest things was when Paul (Maurice) left, we lost a really good leader. Not in terms of play and performance but in terms of the vocal component of it. You have a father/son relationship and I’m not oblivious to the fact that, if he stands up and says something or challenges a player, what’s the first thing they’re going to say? ‘Your dad told you to say that.’ We, as a coaching staff, lost that voice.”

Father and son put their personal connection on hold as well. Instead of having nightly recaps, talking up each other’s performances the way so many parents and their children do after a game, they decided to keep a professional distance. They each remember seeing each other only a couple of times away from the rink.

“I think the one was on his birthday,” Adam said. “My mom was in town. And then the one was on my birthday … There was this glass wall between us.”

The Jets missed the playoffs and did not renew Dave Lowry’s contract. Assistant coaches Jamie Kompon and Charlie Huddy were also let go.

That Winnipeg’s management didn’t immediately recognize this as an untenable situation — and were similarly slow to address Winnipeg’s other cultural problems at the time — held that team back from reaching its potential. No one put it better than Paul Stastny did in the Jets’ exit interviews that year.

“We’ve got to have more respect for each other. When you don’t have that, when you don’t care about the teammate next to you — potentially — and you just care about what you’re doing or certain individual things, that starts bleeding into the game,” Stastny said.

It was a damning statement and, from at least one player’s perspective, an honest assessment of Winnipeg’s team culture. It soon became the reason Bowness was the right head coach — and Lowry the right captain — for a new Jets era.

Bowness was well aware of the Jets’ reputation for locker room issues when he was hired on July 3, 2022.

“I wasn’t in that room, but I was hearing that the Xs and Os were secondary and culture was number one,” Bowness told The Athletic. Then you start reading the comments from players. It had to get your attention and it had to get addressed. That’s what we did.”

Bowness spent his summer reaching out to Jets players directly, asking questions about what had gone well, what hadn’t, and what needed to change. On Sept. 16, the Jets put out a press release announcing that they would play the season without a captain, but with “a group of assistants yet to be determined.” Wheeler’s “C” was removed but he remained with the team. That itself was a difficult situation, with Wheeler conveying later that he felt “blindsided” by the move, but it began Winnipeg’s cultural shift.

The Jets made the playoffs in Bowness’ first season but fell to Vegas in five games. Speaking at the podium in Las Vegas, Bowness expressed tremendous distaste for the team’s lack of pushback when the season and playoffs got tough.

“It’s the same crap we saw in February,” Bowness said at the time. “As soon as we were challenging for first place and teams were coming after us, we had no pushback. This series, we had no pushback. Their better players were so much better than ours, it wasn’t even close.”

The Jets traded Dubois to Los Angeles on June 27, 2022, for Gabriel Vilardi, Alex Iafallo, Rasmus Kupari, and a second-round draft pick. On June 29, they bought out Wheeler’s contract. For Bowness, it was a major plateau in the dressing room’s shift from the old guard to the new.

“Listen, I spent nine years with the Jets in the 80s. I never heard one person say Winnipeg wasn’t a great place to play or that they didn’t want to be there. So when I heard that people didn’t like Winnipeg or didn’t like the culture, those things hit home with me. The first thing we were going to address was that,” Bowness said.

As Bowness made his changes from the top, Lowry grew in his role with the Jets organization and the community. Mark Chipman approached Lowry with the opportunity to get involved with the Toba Centre; Lowry embraced it and wowed the Winnipeg-based non-profit with his humility and his willingness to learn. Bowness empowered Lowry on the ice with some of the toughest checking line assignments in the NHL; Lowry responded by taking his game to its highest level. After scoring 21 points playing for his dad, Lowry produced 36-point and 35-point seasons playing shutdown roles on Bowness’ teams.

On Sept. 12, 2023, Lowry was named captain.

We’ll battle beside him any day 😤 pic.twitter.com/2eeP3tjtGh

— Winnipeg Jets (@NHLJets) September 12, 2023

“When you see a guy like that putting his body on the line, doing everything he possibly can for this team, you have no choice but to follow,” Cole Perfetti said of Lowry. “He is vocal in the room, but I think the way that he leads this team is through his actions and through his play.”

There is also the matter of Lowry’s classiness off the ice. Bowness remembers how hard it was to be away from his head coaching duties, but how much sense it made to be with his wife, Judy, after she suffered a seizure in October 2023. Arniel took over as interim head coach during Bowness’ absence, paving the way for the success he’s having now. Bowness is proud of him for that.

But Bowness most fondly remembers his return for an act of kindness from Lowry.

“I’ll go back to when we had our medical issue last year and I came back (to the team) in Florida,” Bowness said. “Adam made sure I got that game puck. We’d won 3-0 so it was a big game for a lot of players. But he took the time to say, ‘Make sure Bones gets that puck.’”

Rick and Judy, we love ya 🫶 pic.twitter.com/6tOKzvSUyP

— Winnipeg Jets (@NHLJets) November 25, 2023

Back in 2022, when times were tough, Lowry thinks the Jets were trying to make the best of a bad situation. The suddenness of Maurice’s departure left Kevin Cheveldayoff and his staff without an abundance of options.

Lowry said assistant GM Craig Heisinger spoke to him after that season to address his concerns. Heisinger told him the Jets had failed to recognize the added pressure and stress. The Jets have put people and processes in place such that they don’t end up in such an untenable situation again. The Jets have added four psychologists to their staff since that time.

“That, for me, goes a long way to show how the organization cares about us as people,” Lowry said. “They care about the members of their organization, they take feedback, and they try to improve our quality of life. In turn, it improves our quality of play.”

Lowry’s growth between his toughest season and today’s Round 2 appearance is not a straight line. It would not be precise to say that he scored the goal that got Winnipeg to Round 2 against Dallas because the Jets recognized their cultural issues and addressed them in multiple ways.

But the human side of the game clearly matters to him, to his teammates, to his parents, and to the coach who made him captain. Bowness and Lowry expressed their love for one another as people in that surprise call on TNT.

“Thanks, Bones,” Lowry said. “Those words mean a lot to me. I love you. I appreciate the time we got to spend together.”

Before the call was done, Lowry expressed appreciation for Bowness’ wife, Judy, and respect for Bowness’ awkward position as the former head coach of both Dallas and Winnipeg. He joked about needing to send a care package Bowness’ way to guarantee support for the Jets in Round 2.

Bowness told The Athletic that the exchange brought a tear to his eye.

But what about Winnipeg’s progress, three years after Bowness was hired? Is this team showing him what he hoped to see when he and his staff went to work three years ago?

“The ultimate goal is what Winnipeg has now,” Bowness said. “They play so hard for each other and push each other. That’s a winning team.”

(Top photo: James Carey Lauder / USA Today Sports)

This news was originally published on this post .

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