The nominees for this year’s Jack Adams Award are Ottawa’s Paul MacLean, Anaheim’s Bruce Boudreau, and Chicago’s Joel Quenneville, according to the NHL. The award will be given “to the NHL coach adjudged to have contributed the most to his team’s success.”
Overcoming adversity is something that all teams have to do, but no one had more roadblocks than MacLean’s Senators. They lost major pieces of their team for significant portions of the season, including the reigning Norris Trophy winner, Erik Karlsson, their top two goal scorers in 2011-12, Milan Michalek and Jason Spezza, and starting goaltender Craig Anderson.
The Senators weren’t regarded as a juggernaut even when all those players were healthy and any one of those losses could have been justification for the team missing the playoffs. Instead Ottawa fought against the odds and managed to squeeze into the postseason.
Boudreau replaced Randy Carlyle as the Anaheim Ducks’ bench boss during the 2011-12 and since then the Ducks have bounced back in a huge way.
Anaheim captured the second seed in the Western Conference with a 30-12-6 record. It’s worth noting that the Ducks had their highest points percentage in franchise history. That means they would have bested their record of 110 points in a single season had they maintained that pace through a full 82-game campaign.
Boudreau previously won the Jack Adams Award in 2008.
This is also the season that everything seemed to come together for Joel Quenneville’s Blackhawks. They got off to a historic start to the season and went 21-0-3 before finally suffering their first loss in regulation time. They never slowed down significant and won the Presidents’ Trophy with a 36-7-5 record.
Quenneville won the Jack Adams Award in 2000 when he led the St. Louis Blues to the Presidents’ Trophy with a 51-19-11-1 record.