Spencer Carbery of the Washington Capitals has won the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the year.
The league announced the honour Saturday after members of Carbery’s family surprised him with the trophy earlier in the week. Carbery is the first person to be named coach of the year in the NHL, American Hockey League and ECHL.
Carbery was a runaway winner of the Jack Adams as voted on by the league’s broadcasters, receiving 81 of 103 first-place votes. Winnipeg’s Scott Arniel was second and Montreal’s Martin St. Louis a distant third.
In his second season running an NHL bench, the Victoria native guided Washington to first place in the Eastern Conference. He helped several players set career highs as the Capitals reached the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
“The best thing indication is a lot of our guys had career years, and I think he’s a big part of it: the way he communicates, the way he holds guys accountable, the way he can fit guys into certain roles and use their strengths,” Capitals general manager Chris Patrick said at his end-of-season news conference. “I think the relationship between the players and the coach throughout our lineup was excellent this year.”
When he was named a finalist last month, Carbery said it was an organizational award.
“I look at our entire staff and everything that they put in, our players, management to provide the players everything,” Carbery said. “It’s for my name to be there as the figurehead of the organization, but I look at that to me that’s a team-nominated award of what we’ve done as a coaching staff, management team, our players, what they’ve accomplished in the regular season.”
Carbery drew praise from counterparts around the league for how he got an aging roster into the postseason in his first season in Washington and took it to another level by transforming the Capitals into one of the league’s top teams.
“He’s turned them into a deep, four-line juggernaut that just wins hockey games,” said Tampa Bay’s Jon Cooper, the longest-tenured coach in the league who won the Stanley Cup in 2020 and ’21 and has made two other trips to the final. “They do everything right. There’s no egos on the team and he’s found a way to coach a Hall of Fame superstar and coach players that are just surviving to be in the lineup every night and he’s found a way to make it all work.”
