With the Stanley Cup Final rolling on, the NHL is beginning to announce the winners of its season-long awards.
We already heard about Matthew Schaefer winning the Calder Trophy as Rookie of the Year, while Zach Werenski won the Norris Trophy as the league’s best defenseman.
Yesterday, the league announce the winner of the Jack Adams Award, given to the coach “adjudged to have contributed the most to his team’s success,” and it was a bit of a surprise: Jon Cooper of the Tampa Bay Lightning took home
the top spot.
Locally, the news is that Bruins head coach Marco Sturm finished eighth in Jack Adams voting in his first full season behind an NHL bench, which is no small feat.
Per the NHL, the top ten coaches in this year’s voting were:
- Cooper
- Lindy Ruff
- Dan Muse
- Jared Bednar
- Martin St. Louis
- Travis Green
- Rick Tocchet
- Sturm
- Rod Brind’Amour
- Glen Gulutzan
(View the full voting breakdown on NHL.com.)
After a basement finish the year before, Sturm led the Bruins back to the playoffs via a 100-point season and generally had the team performing far above statistical projections/expectations.
Sturm was a longshot to actually win the award, but finishing eighth is a testament to the job Sturm and his staff did in Year 1.
Interestingly enough, of the top eight vote-getters for the award, five are in the Atlantic Division: Cooper (TBL), Ruff (BUF), St. Louis (MTL), Green (OTT), and Sturm.
The main talking point after the announcement was how Ruff should have been the winner, and it’s hard to argue against that.
Many Tampa people point to Cooper’s strong work navigating some injury challenges in Tampa, which is valid, but I’m not sure how that overshadows what Ruff achieved.
In fact, you could make pretty convincing arguments over Cooper for every other Atlantic coach featured, plus throw some weight behind Muse in Pittsburgh (though he still had plenty of superstars) and Tocchet in Philadelphia.
It’s worth noting that voting for these awards was conducted prior to the playoffs, so it’s really only factoring in regular season success.
Members of the NHL Broadcasters’ Association cast the Adams votes.
Anyways, it’ll be fun to argue about this for a few days!
Next up for the Bruins will be the Vezina Trophy, where Jeremy Swayman is a finalist alongside Ilya Sorokin and Andrei Vasilevskiy.
