Panthers’ Brunette misses out on Adams Award after record season
Andrew Brunette took over as the Panthers’ interim coach amid turmoil and guided them to the Presidents’ Trophy for the first time. It earned him a spot as a finalist for the Jack Adams Award but, for the second straight season, a Panther just missed out on being named the NHL’s Coach of the Year.
Brunette coached Florida for 75 games in the regular season after Joel Quenneville abruptly resigned amid revelations about a decade-old scandal and kept the Panthers on track, setting franchise records for points, wins, points percentage, goals and goal differential, while finishing with the NHL’s best record for the first time.
Darryl Sutter, however, beat out Brunette for the Adams Award after guiding the Calgary Flames to first place in the Pacific Division in the first full season of his second stint as coach.
New York Rangers coach Gerard Gallant was the third finalist.
Last year, Quenneville was a finalist for the Adams Award, only to lose to Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour. Doug McLean and Gallant are also past finalists for Florida.
Brunette’s case was complicated. At the start of the year, there was no obvious expectation he’d be a head coach anytime soon. In the first month of the season, plans quickly changed after revelations came to light about Quenneville’s mishandling of a 2010 sexual-assault allegation when he was coach of the Chicago Blackhawks.
Quenneville, who won three Stanley Cups with
the Blackhawks and was hired by Florida in 2019 to try to finally turn the Panthers into a contender, resigned after only seven games. General manager Bill Zito immediately named Brunette as the interim coach, although he never made any guarantees it would last the whole season.
For the regular season, sticking with Brunette proved to be the wise choice. The Panthers were undefeated when Quenneville resigned and Brunette, 48, stepped in with the mindset to not change too much of what was working.
In the final 75 games, Florida had the third best record in the NHL and even set a franchise record with 13 straight wins in the spring.
Brunette also coached the Atlantic Division in the 2022 NHL All-Star Game.
“I didn’t change. I just try to be myself and I think players see through it if you’re not authentic,” Brunette said last month. “I wanted to make sure that I was myself and the credit is all to them. They
made that transition very seamless, they made it easy for me, they competed their butts off all year, so that’s all you can ask. I didn’t do anything special.”
The Adams Award, however, is often given to the coaches of teams which exceed expectations and the Panthers were widely expected to be one of the best teams in the league after finishing the 2020-21 NHL season with the fourth best record.
Brunette’s case was more about Florida’s historic regular-season excellence — the Panthers were the first team to average more than four goals per game since the 1995-96 NHL season — and the way he guided Florida through a tumultuous first month, especially since he had never been a head coach before at any level.
Brunette’s previous experience included two seasons as an assistant coach with Quenneville in Sunrise and two as an assistant coach for the Minnesota Wild, plus four more in the Wild’s front office. He also played
1,110 games in his NHL
career.
Although the Stanley Cup playoffs are not factored into the Adams Award, Brunette also led the Panthers to their first postseason series victory since the 1996 Stanley
Cup playoffs.
They did, however, get upset and swept out of the second round by the rival Tampa Bay Lightning, becoming only the fourth team in NHL history to be swept out of the Cup playoffs after winning the Presidents’ Trophy.
Brunette stayed the interim coach the whole way and Zito still hasn’t said whether he expects the coach to be back in South Florida next season.
“We’re going to take a little bit of time here,” the GM said last week. “We’re going to let all the emotions just settle, and we’re going to make a thorough and rational call, go through a decision-making process and we’re going to come to conclusions for the right reasons.”