The Jack Adams Award is a quirky little trophy. Technically speaking, it’s an award given to the NHL coach “adjudged to have contributed the most to his team’s success.” Which is tricky to parse right off the bat, as no one really knows how to “adjudge” something.
Most often, the Jack Adams is instead described as an award for “Coach of the Year,” and that’s a little easier to understand. But then, in actual application, the results don’t really match with that, either.
If the Jack Adams were merely an award for the best coach, it stands to reason that certain coaches would win a lot of them, like a Connor McDavid piles up playing-related awards. Some coaches are just better than others, and some are a lot better than others. But for whatever reason, multi-time winners of the JA are exceedingly rare.
Since the award started being handed out as of the 1973-74 season, only seven coaches have one more than once, with those being Jacques Demers, Pat Quinn, Pat Burns, Scotty Bowman, Jacques Lemaire, John Tortorella, and Barry Trotz. Burns is the only one on the list to win three Jack Adamses, everyone else won two, and every winner not on the list was a first- and one-time winner.
And as for consecutive Jack Adams wins? Forget about it. It’s only happened once, back in 1987 and 1988 with Demers winning back-to-back as head coach of the Detroit Red Wings.
Why is this the case? A clue may lie in who selects the award. The Jack Adams is unique in that it is voted upon by the National Hockey League Broadcasters Association, and broadcasters love a good narrative. As such, the Jack Adams has slowly but surely morphed from “Contributed most to team’s success” to “Coach of the Year” to what some now cynically refer to as “Coach of the Most Improved Team” or “Coach of the Team That Most Outpaced Expectations.”
And it’s hard to be the most improved team or really outpace expectations two years in a row. Ergo, only one consecutive Jack Adams winner ever.
What does this all have to with the Vancouver Canucks? Well, the Canucks were one of, if not the, most improved team in the NHL last year, and they definitely greatly outpaced preseason expectations. That made head coach Rick Tocchet the odds-on, and eventual winner, of the 2024 Jack Adams.
Which, if you’re following along, should mean that Tocchet is the least likely coach to win the 2025 Jack Adams, as consecutive wins haven’t happened in nearly a half-century. But you’ve read the headline already, you know we’re taking the argument in a different direction.
Why?
Unfinished business and a bushelful of new challenges, each of which land squarely on Tocchet’s plate.
Yes, the Canucks improved over the course of the 2023-24 season. Yes, they ended up with a far better result than anyone could have predicted. No, the work is not yet finished, and no one is satisfied yet.
For all Tocchet’s successes, there were some notable areas needing improvement.
It probably starts with Elias Pettersson, who will enter the 2024-25 season as the highest-paid player on the team, the highest-paid player in franchise history, and the highest-paid player Tocchet has ever coached.
No one is satisfied with how Pettersson performed last year, including both Pettersson and Tocchet. So, here you have a reigning Jack Adams winner who didn’t even get the most out of the individual who should be his leading forward. If Tocchet can get Pettersson back in track in 2024-25, that’s an enormous coaching win.
The blueline also remains an ongoing issue. A hot start last year began to fade as Carson Soucy frequently exited the lineup with injury and Filip Hronek’s offence fell off a cliff, necessitating the in-season acquisition of Nikita Zadorov. By the time the playoffs rolled around, the balance was off and Quinn Hughes was being taxed a little too heavily. Now, Tocchet will have to attempt to rebalance the blueline without Zadorov or Ian Cole, and with two new bodies in Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais to accommodate.
Again, if Tocchet can get as much or more out of this D corps as he did in 2023-24, that’s another sizeable coaching W.
And those are just the two ‘big’ jobs on Tocchet’s 2024-25 plate.
He’s also got to build a new top-six, cobbling together a forward corps that has two dedicated duos in JT Miller/Brock Boeser and Dakota Joshua/Conor Garland and a whole bunch of other disparate parts. He’s got to increase the team’s physicality. He has to find ways to make up for the defensive losses represented by Zadorov and Cole. He needs to improve both the penalty kill and especially the power play.
The point being that this is an awful lot of to-dos for a reigning Jack Adams winner to still have on their plate the year after. And that’s not even mentioning those challenges that are outside of Tocchet’s control and purview, like the ongoing crease crisis and the potential of starting the year without Thatcher Demko.
None of that bodes well for Tocchet having a stress-free year and being able to rest on the laurels of his Jack Adams victory. But it might bode well for his chances of breaking tradition and winning the award a second consecutive time.
No one is really expecting the Canucks to climb much higher in the standings in 2024-25 than they already did in 2023-24. But if Tocchet can get Pettersson back to his best, and rebuild the blue line, and reconstruct the forward corps, and clean up the special teams? That would constitute an awful lot of improvement over last year’s product. It would certainly lead one to adjudge Tocchet as having contributed heavily to his team’s success.
In the end, a second Jack Adams for Tocchet is a long shot. We wouldn’t be putting any real money on it. But it does seem that Tocchet has as much unfinished business, and as many opportunities for coaching ‘wins’ in 2024-25, as any other winner in recent memory – and that should at least give him slightly higher odds of repeating.
