Jon Cooper is the front-runner to (finally) win first Jack Adams Award
Jon Cooper has done his fair share of winning over the course of his career. The head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning has two Stanley Cup championships, four Eastern Conference championships, and last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off championship to his name. While he just missed out on adding an Olympic gold medal to his trophy case, he could be in line for another first in his storied career; the Jack Adams award.
Despite being one of the NHL’s most successful coaches for over a decade, Cooper has yet to be recognized as the coach of the year with a Jack Adams. This season, though, that could change. Cooper has the Lightning on top of the Atlantic Division, and his profile got a nice little boost from his run with the Canadian men’s team at the Olympics.
On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed Cooper’s odds of winning the first Jack Adams trophy of his career.
Tyler Yaremchuk: He’s been widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best coach in the NHL for a number of years now, but he doesn’t have the Jack Adams to go with it. This feels like one of those years where maybe it’s course correction. The award seems to have always gone to not who’s necessarily the best coach, but the coach of a team who does something that’s unexpected, a team that blows away their preseason expectations. With the traditional thinking of the award, it should be Dan Muse’s to lose, or even Patrick Roy would have a pretty good case with what he’s done on Long Island. Over or under a 50% chance that this is finally the year for Jon Cooper to win a Jack Adams?
Carter Hutton: I think over 50%. I think this is his year, especially for everything he’s done in hockey with the Tampa Bay Lightning. They’re run of Cups, and being a powerhouse, and he’s never won it. So I think this year sets up well for him. But I’m with you, there’s so many great storylines this year. You could talk about numerous coaches with where they’re at. The good thing with this, unlike the gold medal game, they actually wait until the season is over to vote, not at the end of the first period for the MVP of the game. So this will be nice to see the season through and see who wins it. But I think it’s Jon Cooper’s time, because with the rest for (Nikita) Kucherov and the rest for (Andrei) Vasilevskiy with where they’re at, I look for them to add at the trade deadline too, so this should be a big push this year for the Tampa Bay Lightning.
You can catch the full discussion and the rest of Tuesday’s episode here…