Three of the four surviving teams in the 2015 NHL playoffs have veteran coaches. The Tampa Bay Lightning have Jon Cooper, who is handling his team beautifully in his second full season as an NHL coach.
It’s particularly remarkable given the experience gap between the sophomore coach and his distinguished rivals.
When Cooper got into coaching for the first time, doing part-time work running a team for a Catholic high school in 1998-99, his current rivals were already well-established:
- Joel Quenneville was a year away from winning the Jack Adams Award with St.