Why Mike Babcock has not won the Jack Adams Award

The NHL defines the trophy as "the National Hockey League coach adjudged to have contributed the most to his team's success." Now, as the pattern can be observed, it is usually awarded to a coach who doesn't have, say, the most successful team, but gets them to a position that people did not previously believe they could attain. Therefore, people attribute the success to the coach, and only the coach.

But there is a severe problem with this. No matter what happens, an organization is a team on the ice. No one person can attribute success, and no one person can take it away. Its just like when people defend their goalie. A goalie can let in goals, sure, and people may say its that goalies fault the team lost the game. But there is more than one way to look at it. The defensemen could have blocked more shots, they could have cleared the zone more. The forwards could have provided a scoring cushion allowing the goalie to give up more. Bottom line, the entire team wins, the entire team loses.

The same can be said for coaches. Fred Shero won the first Jack Adams award in 1973-1974 as the coach contributing most to his team's success. The Philadelphia Flyers won the Stanley Cup that season. John Tortorella won it as the Head Coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2003-2004. Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup that year. Now, one could assume that the coach was one of the only attributes to their success, but that is simply ridiculous. The team that wins the Stanley Cup is the best team in the NHL, as everyone should know. So these two scenarios are the perfect Jack Adams awards. A legendary coach with amazing players and the two combine to an extreme victory, the most severe of such is the Stanley Cup.

So why hasn't Mike Babcock won the Jack Adams? For nearly 8 seasons (how long has Nick Lidstrom been playing?) he has set up beautiful plays for his amazing players. Neither can be attributed to the sole success of the Detroit Red Wings, but it is obvious Mike Babcock is a huge piece in the puzzle of one of the best NHL teams in this decade.

Now, I'm not saying the coach of the Stanley Cup winning team needs to win the Jack Adams by default. I'm not saying the last team in the league's coach cannot win the Jack Adams. All that this definition points to is that it is difficult to judge a team without their coach and to judge a coach without their team.