Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Roy, Babcock, Cooper named Jack Adams finalists

Patrick Roy

Colorado Avalanche head coach Patrick Roy smiles as he takes questions after the Avalanche’s 6-1 victory over the Anaheim Ducks in a hockey game in Denver on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2013. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

AP

A rookie, a sophomore and the league’s longest-tenured head coach have been nominated for this year’s Jack Adams award.

Colorado’s Patrick Roy, Tampa Bay’s Jon Cooper and Detroit’s Mike Babcock are up for the trophy, given annually to the league’s top coach. A look at the finalists, per NHL.com:

Mike Babcock, Detroit Red Wings

Babcock led the Red Wings (39-28-15, 93 points) to their 23rd consecutive Stanley Cup Playoff berth, the longest active streak in North American professional sports. Detroit overcame a franchise-record 421 man games lost due to injury, headlined by the 37-game absences of star forwards Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg. The Red Wings used 38 players during the regular season, including nine who made their NHL debuts -- the club’s highest figures in both categories since 1990-91. Babcock is a Jack Adams finalist for the second time, having placed third in 2007-08.

Jon Cooper, Tampa Bay Lightning

In his first full season behind the bench, Cooper guided Tampa Bay (46-27-9, 101 points) to a second-place finish in the Atlantic Division after the club placed 28th in the overall League standings in 2012-13. The coach of Tampa Bay’s AHL affiliate in Norfolk when it captured the 2012 Calder Cup, Cooper successfully incorporated several young players into the Lightning lineup, as a League-high eight rookies appeared in at least 40 games -- five more than any other club. The Lightning were 20-11-9 in one-goal games after ranking last in the NHL with a 5-12-4 mark the season before, and posted 21 road wins, one shy of the franchise record.

Patrick Roy, Colorado Avalanche

Roy lifted the Avalanche (52-22-8, 112 points) to a historic turnaround in his rookie season as an NHL head coach, helping the team finish third in the overall League standings after placing 29th in 2012-13. Colorado became the first club since the NHL expanded to 21 teams in 1979 to go from the bottom three to top three in a single season. The Avalanche matched a franchise record for wins, recorded the NHL’s best road mark (26-11-4), ranked fourth in the League in goals (250) and did not suffer a regulation loss when leading after two periods (35-0-3).

As for snubs? Claude Julien, who led the Bruins to the Presidents’ Trophy, failed to crack the top three, as did Bruce Boudreau, who took Anaheim to first place in the Western Conference on the strength of 54 wins and 116 points.

Todd Richards, who got Columbus into the playoffs for just the second time in franchise history, was also overlooked.

As mentioned above, Babcock is the only one of the three to have been previously nominated for the Adams. It’s worth noting that no Colorado coach has ever won the award (though Marc Crawford did capture it while coaching the Nordiques); John Tortorella was the first and only Tampa Bay coach to win an Adams in 2004, while the last Detroit coach to win one was Scott Bowman in 1996.