Rick Bowness doubles down on the Riley Tufte situation.

Dallas Stars head coach Rick Bowness came under fire this week in a way that I think he might not have expected. Bowness became the target of criticism when he made a highly controversial decision regarding the play of 4th line forward Riley Tufte. 

Tufte, who is a native of Coon Rapids, Minnesota, was set to play in just the 3rd game of his National Hockey League career this week, one that had an abundance of sentimental value for him specifically. The game was set to be held at the Xcel Energy Center, the home of the Minnesota Wild, where Tufte had played as a young man and where he had dreamed of one day playing in the NHL.

In his excitement at the moment Tufte reportedly spent a significant portion of his NHL call up money to splurge on tickets for friends and family, only to learn just hours before the game that Bowness had decided to make him a healthy scratch. That the decision was made at all drew the ire of fans from around the league, but the fact that Bowness had done it to make a very minor substitution on the fourth line made it all the more damning.

Bowness has since tried to explain away the decision but it has hounded him ever since. On Saturday he was asked if he had smoothed things over with Tufte, a player the Stars selected in the first round (25th overall) of the 2016 NHL Entry Draft, and his response seemed to diverge from what he had claimed earlier in the week.

"Honestly, I don't understand," began Bowness before cutting himself off. "Here's how it worked out. Wednesday I told him, you're probably not playing tomorrow night. I didn't want him to go buy a bunch of tickets for a bunch of family and friends. We get to the rink on Thursday morning, Seggy's back in the hotel another guy (Roope Hintz) is pulled off the ice for testing positive (for COVID). Now, we're down two [players] so I went to Riley and Joel Hanley and said, you guys are going to play tonight now because these two guys are out. We were going to play 11 and 7 because we were going to have to. When I left the rink at 12:30, that's what we were doing.

"I come back at 4 o'clock and they tell, [Seguin and Hintz] are ready to play, they for the green light to play. First thing I did was I picked up the phone and I called Riley. I said Riley, before anyone buys tickets here gets committed, you're out tonight now. It's changed. I do want you to take warm up in case someone else gets sick but as of 4 o'clock, he knew he wasn't going to play so they had lots of time to cancel their tickets or whatever that was so I honestly don't understand the big deal about this but whatever.

"He's a good kid, we had a good conversation. There are no issues."