How real is the Jack Adams Award curse?

– 42 of the 49 Jack Adams winners, a whopping 85.7 percent, saw a decline in their teams’ points percentages the very next year.

– 24 of 49, or 49.0 percent, were fired from their positions within three or fewer seasons of winning the Jack Adams, and 14, or 28.6 percent, lasted no more than two seasons. So more than a quarter of all Coach of the Year winners have been pink-slipped within two years of winning the award.

– 17 winners, or 34.7 percent, were never fired from the teams with whom they won the Jack Adams, walking away on their own volition or just parting ways without new contracts.

– The control group in the experiment, of course, would be the non-winners. Is it possible there’s no Jack Adams curse and that we’re simply seeing the turnover rate for all coaches applied here? By the end of last season, the average coaching tenure in the NHL was down to 2.28 years. From 2012-13 through 2021-22, the average Jack Adams winner lasted just 2.30 years following his win. So the rate is almost the same – but let it sink in that the best coaches in the league last no longer than the non-winners. So much for earning extra runway. It certainly appears the curse has legs.

But why?

The first and most obvious answer is elevated expectations. Of course 85 percent of Jack Adams Winners regress the season after. If someone is being named the top coach in the game, he obviously had a great year and, particularly in the modern game, parity makes it difficult to string multiple elite campaigns together. Take Gerard Gallant’s Vegas Golden Knights, for example. He took an expansion team to the Stanley Cup Final in 2017-18, boosted by a lineup that was better than anyone imagined after Vegas used the expansion draft to brilliantly extort teams for assets. It was virtually impossible to repeat what will go down as one of the most improbable seasons not just in hockey history but pro team sports history.

As pointed out by 2011-12 winner Ken Hitchcock: the winner of the Jack Adams often carries a newfound pressure that takes a mental toll going forward.

“What I really noticed was that expectations changed dramatically [the season after I won], because it was almost like, we were just so happy we got in the playoffs, so happy we’re relevant again, that was hard, doing it again,” he said. “Because you weren’t sure what your level was going to be. The next year, I felt a lot more pressure right off the bat. I felt that in training camp. I felt it in exhibition games. I felt a lot more pressure to do it a little bit better. That’s a tough burden to carry.”

“It’s all about expectations,” said 2007-08 Jack Adams winner Bruce Boudreau. “I look at, OK, last year’s award winner was Rick Tocchet. Now, I don’t think he’s getting fired anytime soon, but if they don’t do at least what they did last year, they’re going to consider it a failure. Then owners consider it a failure, and they get one more kick at the can the next year, and if they don’t start off good they’re going somewhere else. That’s how that happens. When Hartley won it, the next year he got fired because they didn’t reach the same expectations. It’s difficult to do.”

Another culprit behind the curse: statistical regression. Tracking back to 2007-08, the first year we got full analytical data league wide, here’s a look at where each Jack Adams winner’s franchise ranked in PDO, a stat combining shooting and save percentage to produce a measure of puck luck.

Of the 17 teams in that sample, five led the league outright in PDO, eight were top-two in PDO, 12 were top 10 in PDO, and the average rank was sixth. You have to be good to be lucky and lucky to be good, naturally, but there’s no denying a lot goes right during a Jack Adams season. You tend to get the saves in your own end and the bounces in the other team’s end. In many cases, the team with the Jack Adams winning coach had struggled the season prior only to overreach, putting itself in an unrealistic situation the following year.

“The Jack Adams Award, when you look at the coach’s record, usually is won by a coach that takes a team from a lower position to a higher position rather than a coach who maintains a high position,” Hitchcock said. “You’re climbing the ladder as you win the award. And sometimes the reality is that your team’s record is really somewhere in the middle.”

“Sometimes they can’t sustain it because they played better than they were supposed to play the year before,” Boudreau said. “And so, instead of being the Golden Boy, you’re out on your ear.”

Lastly, there’s the cycle of the salary-cap era. Perhaps turnover is at such a high rate because contention lifespans are shorter, governed by the windows in which teams have their top players still on reasonable AAVs and some upcoming young talents producing on entry-level cap hits. You only get so many seasons in a row on top now. There have been 11 playoff streaks in NHL history of more than 15 years, and only one of them began this millennium. Only seven teams league-wide have active playoff streaks of five years or longer. Coaches thus get used up faster than ever – even those crowned as the league’s best.

“There’s no room for growth in coaching now,” Hitchcock said. “It’s win now or have success now. So because of the cap, we’re all at the same level now. There’s maybe two or three teams in the whole league in the rebuild stage where there’s time for a coach. But the other 25 or so teams, there’s no time. That’s why you’re seeing such a massive turnover. Expectations are high, everybody’s spending to the cap, and you’re expected to do well right off the bat, so if you don’t do well, you’re gonna get replaced. We look like the English Premiership now.”

So maybe “curse” is the wrong word. “Effect” may be more appropriate. It’s accurate to say something often does go wonky for Jack Adams winners, but it’s more of an explainable phenomenon than a paranormal one.

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