The Hockey News handed Lindy Ruff an A- grade for his 2025-26 season, and reading the reasoning behind it only makes one thing more obvious: this coach should be sitting with a trophy right now, not a consolation grade.
Adam Proteau’s breakdown lays out exactly what Ruff pulled off. Buffalo opened the season 5-8-4, a start bad enough that it got GM Kevyn Adams fired and left the 66-year-old Ruff himself, by Proteau’s own account, “probably a loss or two away from being fired.” What happened next is the actual story. The Sabres won 13 of their next 14 games and went 45-15-5 the rest of the way, the best record in the entire Atlantic Division, before beating Boston in the first round and pushing Montreal to seven games in the second.
That’s not a nice bounce-back. That’s one of the more dramatic single-season turnarounds a coach has produced anywhere in the league, under a first-year GM, with a franchise that hadn’t been past the first round since 2011.
And here’s what makes the Jack Adams result actually maddening instead of just disappointing: Ruff didn’t lose in a landslide. He lost by three points.
Jon Cooper took the award with 226 voting points. Ruff finished with 223. Dan Muse came in third at 199. According to NHL.com, that made it the closest three-way Jack Adams race since the league started publishing full balloting results back in 1983-84. Cooper’s case wasn’t nothing, a 50-win season and a ninth straight playoff berth in Tampa. But he did it with a roster that had massive preseason expectations and never had one foot near the coaching graveyard. Ruff dragged a team back from the brink of blowing up its own front office.
The Hockey News docked Ruff for two things: the slow start, and a power play that finished 21st in the league at 19.5%. Fair enough on paper. But that’s also exactly the case that should have been made for him, not against him. A coach who steadies a sinking ship, without a full offseason to fix its personal power-play issues, and still finishes three points from the league’s top coaching honor isn’t a guy with real flaws. He’s a guy who got outvoted by the tightest margin in Jack Adams history.
Ruff got his two-year extension from Kekalainen, and an A- from The Hockey News to go with it. Both are deserved. But somewhere in the NHL Broadcasters’ Association’s ballots, three points sit between Buffalo having a Jack Adams winner on its bench and simply having one of the best stories in hockey nobody handed a trophy.
