Columbus Blue Jackets head coach Rick Bowness will miss a second straight game on Saturday, November 14, because of an undisclosed health issue, and the team does not yet know when the 71-year-old will be back behind the bench at Nationwide Arena. Bowness was absent for the Blue Jackets’ game against the Philadelphia Flyers on Saturday night in Columbus, with assistant coach Don Granato again running the bench, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
Blue Jackets president and general manager Don Waddell listed Bowness as day-to-day, the same designation teams use for players, until doctors learn more. “He’s doing more testing on Monday,” Waddell told The Columbus Dispatch. “He was actually here [at the arena] this morning for a little bit. That’s a good sign. He met with the coaches and [all] that. We’ll list him like a player, ‘day-to-day,’ but I’ve talked to him a lot. He’s doing OK. He’s just got some things that are affecting him that we need to figure out … the doctors need to figure out.”
Bowness first missed a game on Thursday, when the Blue Jackets lost 3-1 to the Tampa Bay Lightning at Nationwide Arena — the game in which Columbus’s scoring drought deepened, as NewsForce247 reported earlier this week. Granato, a former head coach of the Buffalo Sabres, handled head-coaching duties in that loss and did so again against Philadelphia, while assistants Trent Vogelhuber and Jared Boll and goaltending coach Niklas Backstrom handled their usual tasks, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
Waddell told The Columbus Dispatch the problem surfaced only in the last few days. “The last couple days, he wasn’t feeling great,” Waddell told the Dispatch. “He came in Thursday morning, and we told him to go home and get rest because he wasn’t ‘looking great, and from there we got our doctors involved and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on.” The team has not disclosed the nature of the issue, and no diagnosis has been announced.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on. What is confirmed, through Waddell’s comments to The Columbus Dispatch, is narrow: Bowness is undergoing medical evaluation, he was well enough to stop by the arena on Saturday morning and meet with his coaches, more testing is scheduled for Monday, and Granato is coaching in the interim. What remains unknown is the cause of the issue, how long the evaluation will take, and whether Bowness will travel with the team when its schedule turns to the road.
Bowness has not been ruled out for the four-game road trip that starts November 17 against the New York Islanders, Waddell told The Columbus Dispatch, but he will not travel with the team when it heads to New York on November 16. That split — possible to join the trip, not traveling at its start — underlines how fluid the situation remains heading into Monday’s tests.
The absence carries an extra weight because of how Bowness arrived in Columbus. He left retirement to join the Blue Jackets in January 2026, taking over midseason for Dean Evason, and said at the time that he was physically up to returning as an NHL head coach and that his wife was just as eager for him to do it, The Columbus Dispatch reported. His previous head-coaching job was with the Winnipeg Jets, and he cited undisclosed family and health issues as the reason he stepped down from that role in April 2024.
In Winnipeg, Bowness twice stepped away during the 2023-24 season for family and medical reasons, according to The Columbus Dispatch — first after his wife, Judy, had a seizure, and later for a minor medical procedure of his own. That history is part of why the organization moved quickly to involve its doctors this week, and why Waddell’s updates have stressed both concern and calm in the same breath.
On the ice, the immediate task falls to Granato and a Columbus team trying to find goals. Saturday’s visitor, Philadelphia, arrived in Columbus on the same weekend road swing that brought Northwestern to Ohio Stadium — where Ohio State hosted the Wildcats at noon on Saturday, as NewsForce247 reported — making it a crowded sports day in the capital city. The Flyers, like the Wildcats, avoided the travel chaos from Friday’s nationwide FAA ground stop, which had stranded travelers at John Glenn Columbus International Airport overnight.
What happens next is straightforward and entirely medical: Bowness undergoes more testing on Monday, the team updates his status once doctors know more, and Granato continues to coach for as long as he is needed. Until then, the Blue Jackets list their head coach the way they would a player whose return nobody wants to rush — day-to-day.
Read more: Blue Jackets’ scoring drought deepens in 3-1 loss to Lightning at Nationwide · Ohio State hosts Northwestern at noon needing a win to stop two-game skid
Photo: Eric, CC BY-SA 2.0