The NHL Broadcasters Association has had two opportunities to honor Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper with the Jack Adams award to date. They have another opportunity this season, but it is hard to imagine that this will be the year that the veteran bench boss finally wins it. The reason is simple: he will again be the victim of his own consistency.
Somewhat ironically, Cooper's best opportunity to win a Jack Adams was probably in his first full season behind the bench in Tampa. In 2013-14, the Lightning surprised the NHL by coming in second in the Atlantic with a roster featuring a whopping 16 rookies or sophomores. The team had finished 28th the year prior.
That would typically signify a great enough turnaround for a bench boss to win the award, yet some guy named Patrick Roy turned that same trick with the Colorado Avalanche in his first season in 2013-14. The Hall-of-Fame goalie beat out Cooper that year, and all Cooper has done since then is become arguably the most consistent coach in the NHL, and one of the top leaders in professional sports.
Then in 2018-19, the Lightning made a joke out of the NHL, cruising to a 62-16-4 record--good for 128 points, and 12 wins more than the next-best team that year. Yet the NHL Broadcasters Association again decided to give the Jack Adams to another coach. Barry Trotz won that year, after--stop us if you've heard this before--leading the New York Islanders to a dramatic season-over-season improvement.
His New York Islanders saw a 23-point improvement, making it (apparently) easy to pass on Cooper and the Lightning. What with their 62 wins and plus-103 goal differential. Sadly, these two losses are the precursors to the 2025-26 edition of the award, which will almost certainly go to Lindy Ruff of the Buffalo Sabres.
Look, Ruff is a deserving recipient of the Jack Adams. There is no denying that. It's just wild to think that the coach who has one of the highest regular-season winning percentages in NHL history and a pair of Stanley Cups still hasn't been named the best coach in the NHL a single time.
Odds are very good that Cooper won't be changing that this season, either, and that's because consistency clearly isn't valued by the voters of the award. Good stories are, which makes sense, since it's the talking heads who sell those stories to fans who choose the winner of the Jack Adams.
If leading a rag-tag group of Lightning skaters in 2013-14 wasn't good enough, and one of the best seasons of the salary cap era wasn't good enough, then it's tough to imagine the 2025-26 Lightning did enough to earn Cooper his first Jack Adams. They apparently need to be bad for upwards of a half-decade before anything the human behind the bench does will be considered good enough to be the best coach in the NHL.
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