Who are the Jack Adams frontrunners to start the season?

The NHL season gets started on Tuesday night, and one of the most intriguing aspects of this new season is the amount of new faces behind the bench for high-profile teams.

The New York Rangers, Boston Bruins, Pittsburgh Penguins, Philadelphia Flyers, Vancouver Canucks and Dallas Stars all made moves in the role this offseason, among others.

Their respective new coaches along with all of the returnees will compete for the Jack Adams Award as the league’s coach of the year, an honor that frequently goes to the coach who exceeded expectations the most rather than the one who did the best job in a vacuum.

On Tuesday’s episode of  Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed the different frontrunners as we wait for results to shape the narratives that could drive the race.

Tyler Yaremchuk: André Tourigny in Utah is the favorite at +750. Joel Quenneville right behind him, so those two being the only ones that have shorter odds than 10-to-1 makes sense because this is largely a narrative driven award. It usually doesn’t go to the best coach, it goes to the coach whose team had the most surprising result. Utah getting into the playoffs, you could see the path for Tourigny. One guy I like… there probably is a narrative for Mike Sullivan to win this award in New York, right?

Carter Hutton: I guess maybe because of the narrative, staying in Canada, I look at Martin St. Louis being a finalist last year with Demidov coming in. Sam Montembeault having a big year under his belt. There’s potential there. The other two I would sprinkle on, I would look at Travis Green, and I would look at Craig Berube. These are teams that are foaming at the mouth to win.

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…