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The Adams Award
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I don’t know if you’ve ever examined Pat Burns’ career, but if you have, you would have noticed something curious. Burns has coached three NHL teams in his career (Montreal, Toronto, and Boston), and has won three Adams awards as the league’s best coach, once with each club. The curious thing is that he won each of his awards in his first year with each club: 1989 with the Habs, 1993 with the Leafs, and 1998 with the Bruins. He has won more Adams awards than anyone else. Yet, he has never lasted more than four years with any of his teams. How can a coach be so great in his first year with each team, yet get fired after only a few years each time?
This situation is not unique to Pat Burns; many other coaches have won the Adams in their first full year with their clubs since the award was first handed out in 1974: Bobby Kromm with Detroit in 1978, Pat Quinn with Philadelphia in 1980, Red Berenson with St.Louis in 1981, Tom Watt with Winnipeg in 1982, Orval Tessier with Chicago in 1983, Mike Keenan with Philadelphia in 1985, Jacques Demers with Detroit in 1987, Bob Murdoch with Winnipeg in 1990, Quinn again with Vancouver in 1992, Marc Crawford with Quebec in 1995, and Bill Barber with Philadelphia in 2001 (who didn’t even need a full season). Also, note that Demers is the only coach to ever win the award more than once with the same team (Detroit, 1987 and 1988). So it seems, by the voting, that quite often coaches cease being great after a single season of greatness.
So what is it? Do coaches actually become less effective after one season, or is it a problem of perception? A coach may be considered great if he takes a team that had 70 points last year and gets 90 this year. If, in the following year, the team once again has 90 points, the coach will probably not be seen as being great, because this team is now “supposed” to get 90 points. It may seem to be the only logical answer that it’s a problem of perception, but I’m not so sure. An argument can be made that coaches will always be at their most effective in their first year. And it goes something like this…
First, there is the way in which a new coach is brought in. When you’re looking for a new coach, you can examine the players you have and determine what sort of coach would function best with this group of players. If you had the early 80’s Oilers, you would look for a coach willing to let his players go all offence, all the time. You can tailor your choice of coaches to you player personnel.
Over time, of course, your players change. Even over the course of a single season, there can be free agent acquisitions and losses, trades, players who retire and rookies who make the team. Slowly (or possibly quickly) but surely, the team becomes something different than what the coach was hired to coach. It should not be surprising that the coach therefore becomes less effective.
Another problem could be loyalty. It is a natural human response to be loyal to those who have done well in the past. Coaches do succumb to this every so often, continuing to play a player who was good last year but isn’t this year. Removing an unproductive player who was productive in the past is usually a slow, gradual process. This hurts the team’s performance. A new coach coming in doesn’t face this problem; he’s loyal to no one, and can judge the players on current performance. Eventually, of course, the new coach becomes loyal to certain players, and the cycle repeats.
So as strange as it may seem at first, it can be argued that coaches will tend to gradually lose effectiveness after taking on a new coaching assignment. The idea that the coach is changed only because you can’t change all the players may be invalid. Perhaps making a change for the sake of change can be a good move, if the new coach is a better fit for the team. Perhaps the only reason Ted Nolan isn’t coaching in the NHL is that his style doesn’t fit any team’s needs (yeah right).
So from this perspective, we can see what a coach needs to do to remain in his position long-term. He needs to be flexible, changing his system when the makeup of the team warrants it (are you listening, Ken Hitchcock?). He needs to evaluate his players objectively, literally using a “what have you done for me lately?” attitude. I haven’t studied the issue, but coaches like Scotty Bowman and Al Arbour are/were probably like this, enabling them to coach in the NHL a very long time.
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