Washington Capitals head coach Spencer Carbery has been named a 2025 Jack Adams Award finalist. Winnipeg Jets’ Scott Arniel and Montreal Canadiens’ Martin St. Louis are the two competing coaches for the annual award, which has been handed out since the end of the 1973-74 season.
Carbery, 43, would join Bryan Murray (1983-84), Bruce Boudreau (2007-08), and Barry Trotz (2015-16) as the fourth Capitals bench boss to receive the honor from members of the National Broadcasters’ Association. The Jack Adams Award is presented to the head coach who has “adjudged to have contributed the most to his team’s success.”
After slipping into the postseason on the final day during the 2023-24 regular season with a 40-31-11 record, Carbery’s squad dominated the Metropolitan Division from the start of the season and finished as the best team in the Eastern Conference at the end of the 2024-25 campaign with a 51-22-9 record.
While breakout performances from players like Dylan Strome and Aliaksei Protas aided the process, Carbery had to manage the Capitals through the unknown territory of Alex Ovechkin, who was looking to break Wayne Gretzky’s regular-season goal-scoring record.
Carbery aced that test and kept his team focused as the entire NHL world decided on the team for a few weeks in late March and early April. Ovechkin broke Gretzky’s record on April 6 against the New York Islanders at UBS Arena. Washington even had the luxury of resting some players heading into the last few games of the regular season.
In his The Players’ Tribune article from April 22, Strome credited his head coach for the Capitals’ success this season. “I think it’s a credit to Coach Carbery and the way he has us playing,” Strome wrote. We don’t want to be one dimensional out there. We want to be creative, we want to be exciting. That’s how Ovi plays. You don’t score 897 goals doing the same thing, I can tell you that much.”
If he wins the 2025 Jack Adams Award, Carbery would become the first head coach to win a coach of the year honor at the ECHL, AHL, and NHL levels. He claimed the Louis A.R. Pieri Memorial Award as the AHL’s outstanding coach in 2020-21 with the Hershey Bears. Earlier in his career, Carbery was awarded the John Brophy Coach of the Year Award in 2013-14 while with the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays.
