NHL Awards 2013: Ottawa Senators Paul MacLean Wins Coach of the Year

The NHL is handing out it’s official hardware honoring the best of the best from this season, and while the season was shortened by a lockout, we still saw some great performances this season out of a lot of players and coaches.

But while some coaches went above and beyond this year, the NHL has determined that Ottawa Senators head coach Paul MacLean was the guy who did the best job and have awarded him the Jack Adams Coach of the Year trophy for his efforts with the Sens this season.

Ottawa made the Eastern Conference Playoffs as a seven-seed and managed to knock off the second seeded Montreal Canadiens in the first-round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. But it was the way MacLean was able to hold his team together throughout the season that likely earned him the trophy as despite pitfalls and injuries, the Sens never gave up and stayed competitive right to the end of their season.

One of the major pitfalls for the Sens was losing Erik Karlsson when he had his Achilles sliced by the skate of Pittsburgh Penguins’ Matt Cooke. The injury was added to the loss of star center Jason Spezza who missed the entire regular season save for the first few weeks of the shortened year.

But MacLean held it all together and the Sens rebounded wonderfully to make a thrilling run past the Montreal Canadiens int he playoffs. They couldn’t get past the Penguins, but their season was far from being a lost one and what they were able to do under the leadership of MacLean was truly great and he is more than deserving of the trophy.