The Jack Adams Award is the National Hockey League’s annual honor for the sport’s top head coach. Specifically, it is given to the coach “adjudged to have contributed the most to his (or her) team’s success”. 

When Dean Evason arrived in Columbus just in advance of this season, he was the fourth head coach in the last three years. Brad Larsen, a long-time assistant coach with the CBJ, ended his two-year stint in the spring of 2023.

Then came veteran Mike Babcock, who did not make it to training camp in 2023 after a controversy arose with player interviews and the examination of their phones. The Blue Jackets were looking for someone like Ken Hitchcock or John Tortorella in terms of experience, but the move backfired.

So, with little time before the start of the season, the Blue Jackets returned to elevating an assistant coach, this time Pascal Vincent. Vincent lasted just that season and, once again, Columbus was on the hunt for a new person to guide a batch of promising young players with some solid veterans to mentor them.

There would be another change in the Jackets’ front office. The team parted ways with general manager Jarmo Kekäläinen. Don Waddell decided to leave the hands-on ownership of the Carolina Hurricanes as their GM and make a lateral move to Columbus. He inherited the collection of raw talent that Kekäläinen had assembled.

Waddell and the Columbus ownership group decided to go with a head coach that had experience at the helm. In Dean Evason, who had been released by the Minnesota Wild after a great deal of success there, they had a hard-nosed person who had shown the ability to work with a variety of players with a steady hand.

Then everything changed. The tragic, heart-wrenching death of Johnny Gaudreau, who had caused the world of hockey to re-examine Columbus as a desirable place to play the game, immediately and dramatically lowered everyone’s expectations of what the team could accomplish in the 2024-25 tour.

Evason came into the team’s pre-season camp, telling the staff that he did not want to watch film or be given information on the CBJ returning players so that he could judge them on their camp performance, a clean slate for all..

Of course, he knew of the talent of veterans like Zach Werenski and the newly-signed Sean Monahan, but he wanted to assess the skills of the much-discussed stars in waiting – Adam Fantilli, Kent Johnson, and Cole Sillinger to name a few. And then there were the role players. Who would emerge to fill those critical positions?

The first thing that observers noticed about how Evason handled his new squad was that he let the opening camp play out without making any big judgments. His patience with how things would proceed allowed the Blue Jackets to grieve, reset, and determine the way that they would take on the challenging season ahead.

As expected, there have been some difficult times during this campaign, chief among them the injuries to key players for large portions of the season. Captain Boone Jenner has just recently rejoined the team after injuring his shoulder in the last preseason practice. Erik Gudbranson and Monahan have also missed long stretches.

Through it all, Evason has shown the toughness, patience, and leadership that the team needed to be successful, to play meaningful games in April. He doesn’t allow the team to worry about back-to-back games, or early starts, or tough losses. We’re just playing hockey, right?

While there have been a few minor head-scratchers, like staying with some goaltending play past its effectiveness in certain games, the overwhelming verdict is that the Blue Jackets have overachieved as much as any NHL team in recent memory.

I think Evason’s formula comes down to three things: let players be free enough to display their unique talents (Werenski is back to being Werenski); ask the team to play within a simple structure that emphasizes being on the right side of the puck; and make players who have been overlooked in other systems be invaluable to the team’s total effort (Mathieu Olivier and Dante Fabbro leap to mind – sorry, Nashville).

What cemented my belief that Evason should be the Adams winner, however, was his reaction to the uncharacteristic drubbing the Jackets took on the night of April 3rd against the Colorado Avalanche.

Those of us in the media room knew after the game that the collective temperature was soaring for players and the head coach. But Evason did not betray any confidences or spew any blame, and his treatment of the press was more professional than most would have been able to muster. It was his general philosophy in microcosmic form – be on the right side of what you’re doing.

I frankly don’t thing Dean Evason cares about any awards that might come his way. But that’s all the more reason to recognize, and honor, the way he has gone about his business this year in the most trying time that any sports franchise should have to deal with. And he’s done it with a quiet ferocity that is exactly what the Blue Jackets and the Columbus fanbase needed.

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