Capitals coach wins 2025 Jack Adams Award

In recent days, the NHL has been revealing some of its end-of-season award winners heading into next week’s NHL Awards show. Saturday, the league announced that Capitals head coach Spencer Carbery has won the 2025 Jack Adams Award as “the NHL coach adjudged to have contributed the most to his team’s success,” as selected by the NHL Broadcasters’ Association.

Carbery recently wrapped up his second season behind the bench in Washington and it was a very successful one. After the Capitals put up 91 points in 2023-24, they were 20 points better this year, good for tops in the Metropolitan Division and the Eastern Conference while finishing second overall to Winnipeg. They improved significantly offensively with a jump of 68 goals compared to the year before while being one of the top squads in goal differential and penalty killing. While voting was done before the playoffs, Washington made it to the second round before being ousted by Carolina.

With that improvement, Carbery was the runaway winner for the award, finishing with 81 first-place votes out of 103 and appeared on all but one ballot, good for 464 voting points. He becomes the fourth Washington coach to win the Jack Adams, joining Bryan Murray (1984), Bruce Boudreau (2008), and Barry Trotz (2016). Carbery also becomes the first head coach to win Coach of the Year at all of the ECHL, AHL, and NHL levels.

Jets head coach Scott Arniel finished second in the voting, garnering a total of 16 first-place selections while being on 81 ballots overall, earning him 249 voting points. Canadiens bench boss Martin St. Louis was the other finalist but came a distant third with just two first-place selections and 66 voting points while being picked on 34 ballots. Jim Montgomery (Blues) and Dean Evason (Blue Jackets) rounded out the top five.

The NHL Awards show will run prior to Game 4 of the Oilers/Panthers series at 5 p.m. CT on Thursday with the full list of all award winners being revealed at that time.