- Jon Cooper wins his first Jack Adams Award in his third nomination
- Cooper beats out Pittsburgh’s Dan Muse and Buffalo’s Lindy Ruff in the voting
- Read below for the surprise reveal at TGH and the season behind the trophy
Jon Cooper finally has a Jack Adams Award.
The Tampa Bay Lightning head coach was named the 2026 winner Wednesday after guiding the Lightning to a 50-26-6 record and a ninth straight playoff berth.
It’s his first time taking home the NHL’s top coaching honor in three trips to the finalist round, edging out fellow finalists Lindy Ruff of Buffalo and Dan Muse of Pittsburgh in voting from the NHL Broadcasters’ Association.
Cooper didn’t find out in a conference room. He was at Tampa General Hospital for a ribbon-cutting on a new pediatric cancer family lounge sponsored by his Coop’s Catch for Kids foundation when the league surprised him with the trophy.
A Three-Point Win Over the Favorite
Ruff was the betting favorite heading in. He had walked into Buffalo and dragged the longest playoff drought in NHL history to a close, and voters traditionally eat that kind of turnaround story up.
It almost broke that way again. Cooper finished with 226 voting points and 36 first-place votes to Ruff’s 223 points and 26 first-place nods, with Muse a more distant third at 199. That three-point margin is the second-narrowest in Jack Adams history, behind only Ruff’s one-point win over Peter Laviolette in 2005-06.
The Lightning’s Case
On the numbers, this one wrote itself. Tampa Bay piled up 106 standings points to tie for fifth in the league while burning through injuries all season, finishing near the top in wins, goal differential, road wins, comeback wins, and penalty kill. It was the franchise’s first 50-win season since 2021-22.
Two milestones earlier in the year made the resume even harder to ignore. Cooper coached his 1,000th career NHL game on Dec. 31, all of them with Tampa Bay, and 12 days later became the second-fastest coach in league history to 600 wins with a 5-1 win over Philadelphia. Only Scotty Bowman got there quicker.
The honor pairs Cooper with John Tortorella (2004) as the only coaches in Lightning history to win the Jack Adams. Here’s the full reveal from TGH, caught on camera by 10 Tampa Bay:
Wednesday’s win caps a long road to the podium for the league’s longest-tenured head coach, who was a finalist back in 2013-14 and 2018-19 before breaking through. The Lightning are watching the Stanley Cup Final from home, but Cooper now has some hardware of his own to take into the offseason.
