Rick Bowness has been a fixture in the NHL since the mid-80s. The Dallas Stars’ interim head coach got his first NHL job as an assistant with the Winnipeg Jets in 1984. Since then, in more than three decades of NHL experience, he’s coached 2,388 games as either a head or assistant coach. He passed Scotty Bowman’s 2,164 games in 2017 and has since kept stacking games on an NHL record that may never be broken.



But the coaching story that sticks out to most to Ryan Bowness, Rick’s son, doesn’t concern anything that happened in one of those games. It’s the time the NHL’s all-time coaching leader wasn’t allowed to get behind the bench.



After being fired as head coach of the New York Islanders midway through the 1997-98 campaign, Bowness decided to take a year off the following season. He was still under contract with the team and, at 44 years old, decided it would be a good time to recharge. The family moved back from New...