John Tortorella should be the runaway front-runner for Coach of the Year (so far)
Hello and Happy Tuesday.
The Jack Adams Award (coach of the year) is easily my least favorite award in the NHL. Not because I do not believe in the significance of good (or bad) coaching, but because I think we do an absolutely horrific job of identifying what good (and bad) coaching actually looks like.
More than a quarter of the way through the season I will say that I think we have at least some idea of what it might look like this year, and it is John Tortorella with the Philadelphia Flyers. Right now he has to be the front-runner for the award, and I am honestly not sure who should even be considered close to him.
In a lot of cases the Adams award tends to go to the coach whose team exceeded preseason expectations, barely snuck into the playoffs thanks to outstanding goaltending, and was then easily dispatched as early round cannon fodder for an actual good playoff team. Then the coach tends to get fired within a year or two. Of the past seven Adams winners, only two of them (Rod Brind’Amour in Carolin and last year’s winner, Jim Montgomery in Boston) are still coaching the team they won it with. Of the past 11 winners, six of them were fired within two years of winning, including two coaches that were fired just one year later. It is just an incredibly hard thing for outsiders to quantify because we don’t always know what is happening, or we assign credit to the wrong places.
I wrote a little more than a month ago that I thought new Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch was going to end up being a front-runner for the award after taking over for Jay Woodcroft. In my view, voters were going to see an Oilers team that had a bad record before Knoblauch, started to win more games after Knoblauch, and immediately assign the credit to the coaching change. As expected, Edmonton has started to win a lot more games following the coaching change. But there is not much actual change in the way they are playing. The Oilers spent the first month of the season under Woodcroft playing very similar to what they did a season ago when they looked like a Stanley Cup contender.
The biggest difference this season? The goalies were doing a shockingly bad job stopping the puck and it was single-handedly sabotaging their season. They stopped playing Jack Campbell, Stuart Skinner started giving them at least somewhat competent goaltending, and a deep roster that had been carrying play at even-strength started winning games again.
All of that brings us back to Tortorella.
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