Saturday’s news of Caps coach Spencer Carbery winning the Jack Adams Award for the 2024-25 season comes as no surprise. Carbery’s Caps got off to a strong start to the season and remained remarkably consistent over the 82-game slate, finishing with a 51-22-9 mark and 111 points, an improvement of 20 points over the prior season.
Members of the NHL Broadcasters’ Association are tasked with voting for the Adams Award at the end of the regular season and prior to the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Carbery bested fellow finalists Scott Arniel of Winnipeg and Martin St. Louis of Montreal in winning the Award. Carbery received 81 of 103 possible first-place votes from the ballots, and he nearly doubled runner-up – and former Caps assistant coach – Arniel in total points (464-249) in the voting.
Carbery becomes the first coach in pro hockey history to win top coach honors in each of North America’s top three pro leagues. He won the John Brophy Award (ECHL in 2013-14), and the Louis A.R. Pieri Memorial Award (AHL in 2020-21) prior to claiming the Adams Award in 2024-25.
Carbery is the fourth Caps coach to win the Jack Adams Award, following in the formidable footsteps of a trio of esteemed bench bosses who forged lengthy and distinguished coaching careers in the NHL. Bryan Murray won the Jack Adams Award in 1983-84, Bruce Boudreau won in 2007-08 and Barry Trotz won the first of his two Jack Adams Awards in 2015-16; Trotz later won the Adams again with the New York Islanders.
“Tremendous honor, very humbling,” said Carbery about a month ago, when the three finalists for the Award were revealed. “For us, I look at it as a staff and for that matter an organizational nomination. Just knowing the other 31 head coaches in this League and the amount of respect that I have for them, to be considered for that Award, I look at our entire staff and everything that they put in, our players, and management to provide the players everything.
“For my name to be there as the figurehead of the organization I look at that as a team nominated Award, of what we’ve done as a coaching staff, management team, our players, and what they’ve accomplished in the regular season this year.”
And while Carbery is humble in calling the Adams a team Award, he also isn’t wrong. But you also don’t have to look far to see how vastly the team’s fortunes have risen from a rare low point in in the Alex Ovechkin era when Carbery took over the coaching reins just over two years ago.
From the day he was introduced as Washington’s 20th head coach on May 30, 2023, Carbery has been as honest, clear and forthright a communicator as there is among the League’s two and a half dozen bench bosses. It’s a primary reason he is appreciated by each of his publics – his staff, his players, the media and the fans. Carbery’s passion for and knowledge of the game are evident whenever he speaks, and he has always genuinely enjoyed the processes of making players better individually and outwitting the opposition’s coach on any given night.
During his first season as Washington’s bench boss in 2023-24, Carbery and his coaching staff laid out their vision and the foundation for how they wanted the Capitals to play on a nightly basis. After a slow start, consistency began to take hold early in the second half, and the Capitals’ late season surge landed them the final postseason berth available. The Caps’ stay in the 2024 Stanley Cup playoffs was brief; they were swept aside in four games by the New York Rangers.
But the entire coaching staff returned intact for 2024-25, and the Caps took flight early and found consistency much earlier in the season. From Carbery’s first season to his second, Washington improved from 28th to second in the NHL in goals scored and finished tied for eighth in goals against. Nine players established or matched career bests in points for Washington last season.
And the Caps were also able to win a playoff series for the first time since hoisting the Stanley Cup in Las Vegas on this date in 2018; they ousted the Montreal Canadiens in five games in the first round.
“Anytime your coaching staff stays the same for the next year, I think it’s always a good thing,” says Caps center Dylan Strome. “They understand the team, they know the players and you get to know them on a personal level, which always helps. The way that they prepare and the way that they go into each year with their expectations and what they need from us, and they’re really good at communicating and I think it just makes everything easier. It makes coming to the rink easier, and when you come back from the season and you’re talking to them throughout the summer, you understand what they want from you.
“And that just makes for a seamless transition when you come back to DC at the end of the summer, and you could see it in the way we started out. We beat some really good teams early on in the season and it just propelled us. By no means did we have an easy schedule to start the season, and we found ways to get out to a really good start and we just rode that momentum all year.”
With eight new faces on the team’s opening night roster, Carbery opened his sophomore season as Washington’s bench boss with the significant challenge of integrating essentially a third of his roster – a goaltender, two defensemen and five forwards – into the existing mix, which put on a late-season burst that resulted in an improbable playoff appearance in 2024, an accomplishment achieved with a meager 91 points.
Not only did Carbery, his staff and the Caps’ leadership core integrate those players into the fabric of the team rather seamlessly both on and off the ice, but each area of the Washington lineup also achieved rare heights individually and as positional groups.
With goaltender Logan Thompson – one of the new additions this season – winning 31 games and Charlie Lindgren winning 20 or more games for the second consecutive season, the Caps had a 30-game winner and a 20-game winner in the crease in 2024-25, a franchise first.
On the blueline, newcomers Jakob Chychrun and Matt Roy helped Washington achieve another franchise first; for the first time in its half century history, the team boasted six blueliners with 20 or more points.
With five new faces among the forward ranks at season’s outset, the Caps were able to ice a deep and diverse group of wingers and middlemen, many of whom delivered career seasons in one or more offensive categories. And for just the second time in franchise history, the Caps had five forwards ascend to the 60-point plateau in 2024-25; the feat was previously achieved in 1985-86.
“I think the best indication is a lot of our guys had career years,” says Caps president of hockey operations Brian MacLellan. “And I think he’s a big part of it, the way he communicates, the way he holds guys accountable, the way he can fit guys into certain roles and use their strengths. So I think the relationship between the player and the coach – throughout our lineup – was excellent this year.”
Of the four Washington coaches to win the Adams Award, Carbery joins Murray and Boudreau as the third of the four to be elevated to the post after first serving as the AHL Hershey head coach. Murray coached 17 seasons in the League for five different teams after getting his first gig with the Caps; he coached 1,289 NHL games and forged a .563 point percentage.
Boudreau was 53 when he was promoted from Hershey to Washington on Thanksgiving morning in 2007, and he coached four NHL teams in 1,087 games over a 15-year career, notching a gaudy point percentage of .626. Among all coaches in League history with more than 1,000 games, only the legendary Scotty Bowman (.657) is ahead of Boudreau.
Boudreau’s .655 figure in four seasons with the Caps is tops among the 20 head coaches in Washington’s half century NHL history.
Trotz is the only one of the quartet to start his NHL coaching career elsewhere; he put in a decade and a half behind the Nashville bench before taking the reins here in May of 2014. Trotz is also the only one of the quartet to win a second Adams Award (2018-19 with the Islanders) and the only one to win a Stanley Cup.
With 1,812 games coached in 23 seasons, Trotz ranks fourth all-time in games coached and he is also fourth with 914 career victories.
Two seasons into his own NHL coaching career, it’s not difficult to envision Carbery ascending to the same rungs on the coaching ladder as Murray, Boudreau and Trotz before him. At 43, Carbery has a lot of coaching years ahead of him, and his .616 career point percentage is second only to Boudreau’s .626 among the four Washington coaches to win the Award.
Following a magical sophomore season behind the Caps’ bench, the ultra-competitive Carbery is rightfully proud of his team’s achievements, and he is driven to get his team back to the Stanley Cup final in the years ahead.
“This year and everything that went into it, from starting the year and being picked to finish out of the playoffs, and in whatever place in the Metro [Division] by a majority of people in the hockey world,” said Carbery at season’s end, “and just to come out the way that we did, the season we had, the new acquisitions, [Ovechkin’s] chase, breaking his leg, all the different stuff that we went through this year to win 50 games, to win the Division, to win the Eastern Conference, to chase down that [Ovechkin] record as a group, I really do think that we’re going to reflect a lot on that. They’ll write stories that it was a group chasing a record, and it really was. And you could feel it every night, of the team chasing those goals.
“Would you love to finish the story and the last chapter would be us winning the Stanley Cup? It would be unbelievable. Nonetheless, I’m sure in a few weeks or a month or so, we’ll be able to reflect on a lot of the positives.”
Carbery himself is one of those positives, and one need only look at the state of the franchise now, 24 months after he was hired to his current post, to see the difference he has made on and off the ice here in the District.
Carbery’s first Jack Adams Award is hard earned and richly deserved for a guy who seems to subsist on less sleep than most of us mere mortals and whose hockey mind is constantly on the alert and evolving, looking for ways to make his players and his team better. Carbery’s positive demeanor and attitude, his undying love for the game and his ability to communicate with players, staff and the media make it easy to believe that as good as 2024-25 was for the Capitals, the best is yet to come.
