The Jets’ Scott Arniel, the Capitals’ Spencer Carbery, and the Canadiens’ Martin St. Louis are this year’s Jack Adams Award finalists as the NHL’s top head coach, the league announced.
All are first-time finalists. Unlike most other awards (like the Selke, whose finalists were announced today), the Adams is voted on by broadcast media members, not print/digital.
In his first season behind the Winnipeg bench after taking over for the retiring Rick Bowness, Arniel guided the Jets to their first Presidents’ Trophy and best regular season in franchise history. Promoted after serving as an assistant under Bowness since 2022-23, the former Jets 1.0 forward logged a 56-22-4 record.
This is Arniel’s second stop as an NHL head coach. He was previously at the helm of the Blue Jackets for a year and a half, posting a 45-60-18 (.439) record in 123 games before being fired at the halfway point of the 2011-12 season. He would be the first bench boss in Jets 2.0 franchise history to win Coach of the Year honors.
Over in Washington, Carbery oversaw one of the league’s biggest point increases from 2023-24 to 2024-25 in his second year behind the Capitals’ bench. He’s now posted a 91-53-20 (.616) record across his two seasons in the role, including an Eastern Conference-leading 51-22-9 record this year for Washington’s first division title in five years. While it’s not considered for this award’s purposes, he also just guided the Caps to their first playoff series win since 2018 with a five-game dispatching of the Canadiens in the first round.
Carbery helped improve Washington’s offense from a 28th-ranked 2.63 goals per game last year to 3.49 in 2024-25, second-best in the NHL. If he wins, the 43-year-old would be the first to take home Coach of the Year honors at every stop of the NHL’s professional development pyramid. While in lower levels of the Caps organization, he won COTY honors with ECHL South Carolina in 2013-14 and with AHL Hershey in 2020-21.
As for St. Louis, the Hall-of-Fame winger could add coaching-related honors to a trophy case that includes a Stanley Cup, two Art Ross Trophies, MVP honors, and three Lady Byng Trophies. Coming off his third full season behind the Montreal bench, the 49-year-old helped guide a young Habs squad out of the dark stages of their rebuild. The team recorded their first 40-win season in six years and ended a three-year postseason drought that was tied for the longest (1999-2001, 1920-1922) in franchise history. A Habs bench boss hasn’t been named COTY since Pat Burns in 1989.
Jim Montgomery got snubbed in a way.
Probably the guys who finished 3rd, 4th, 5th in the voting are separated by less then 5 votes. And I’m pretty sure my boy Marty is the guy in 3rd place.
The other 2 are both worthy of winning the award.
Good candidates, but I’d go with Carbery just due to making all that roster turnover work.
I’d have to go with Carbery. The Jets were already an excellent team with a lot of weapons. The Habs made improvements ahead of schedule, but they weren’t worldbeaters. NO one expected this out of Washington.