The firing of Jim Montgomery this week was newsworthy for plenty of reasons, mostly surrounding what it means for the spiralling Bruins. But it was also interesting for awards watchers, who probably recall Montgomery winning the Jack Adams as coach of the year in 2023. It’s fair to say that the list of that year’s finalists has, as the kids say these days, not aged well.
Ruff didn’t even make it through the 2023-24 season, while Hakstol was gone early in the offseason. Montgomery was the comparative ironman, making it all the way until Tuesday.
Three coaches, the apparent very best of the best in 2023, all fired before the end of 2024. We have to ask the question: Is the Jack Adams cursed?
No, because curses aren’t real. But it is a weird award, one that’s typically voted on as much based on short-term surprise factor as long-term excellence. If the trophy truly went to the best coach in the league every year, we’d expect to see plenty of names listed as multiple-time winners, just like we do for the Hart or the Vezina. With the exceedingly rare Jim Carey-level exception that proves the rule, you almost never see nominations for major player awards go to guys who are out of a job entirely within a few years.
But you do see it with the Jack Adams, in part because the broadcasters who vote on it typically lean towards coaches whose teams have exceeded expectations, which is nice but not the same as being the best at the job. Worse, a spot as a Jack Adams finalist combined with an surprisingly strong season often raises expectations, and expectations can be an NHL coach’s worst enemy.
So maybe it’s not surprising that we see the occasional outlier like that 2023 trio of soon-to-deposed coaches. The problem is it’s not much of an outlier at all. So today, let’s look through the Jack Adams finalists for every season of the cap era and ask a simple question: How well did the list hold up, in terms of those guys clearing the low bar of simply keeping their jobs?
I’ve pulled ten years where the answer ranges from “not great” to “big oof”, which seems like a lot considering we’ve only got 19 years to choose from. Let’s count down those 10 lists of finalists, from bad to worse.
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