We thought of trying to build a bit of suspense, first discussing the cases for each of the bona-ide candidates for the Jack Adams Award as the NHL's top coach this season.

	Jacques Martin kept the Senators focused on the ice, not on their paychecks.

At least 10 coaches have done top-flight jobs all season, whether with entrenched elite teams or rebounding franchises. Vancouver's Marc Crawford, Minnesota's Jacques Lemaire, New Jersey's Pat Burns, Dallas' Dave Tippett, St. Louis' Joel Quenneville, Detroit's Dave Lewis, Tampa Bay's John Tortorella, Anaheim's Mike Babcock and Philadelphia's Ken Hitchcock deserve consideration for the award from the ballot-casting NHL broadcasters.

But the choice is -- or at least should be -- obvious.

Ottawa's Jacques Martin deserves to win the award for the second time in five seasons. And this time, it involves more than simple on-ice regular-season success -- though the Senators have had plenty of that. His franchise filed for bankruptcy.

At one point this season, the Senators were told the checks neither were in the mail nor on the way to the bank via direct deposit (which, next to the Automatic Teller Machine, is the greatest invention of all time).

Ottawa's player payroll is modest by NHL standards, even more modest than his phlegmatic stars -- Marian Hossa and Daniel Alfredsson -- can be. The Senators' payroll of roughly $28 million isn't even half that of their Tuesday night opponent in the Corel Centre -- the Colorado Avalanche. Tony Granato has done praiseworthy work since taking over from the fired Bob Hartley on Dec. 18, but he also is coaching a team with a $60.5-million payroll and corresponding high expectations.

At Ottawa, Martin even has been on the job long enough, since taking over in the middle of the 1995-96 season, that his players would have had an excuse -- the NHL's traditional belief that coaches have term limits of credibility and effectiveness with one team -- to tune him out at the first signs of trouble. Heck, his players could have even wondered about the survival of the franchise, period, or whether they would end up next season in Portland, Ore., or somewhere else. (At least Martin could have related how much he enjoyed his one coaching experience in Portland, where his Guelph Platers won the Memorial Cup triumph in the tournament hosted by the Portland Winter Hawks, paving his way to get the St. Louis Blues' job in 1986.)

If all the turmoil this season in Ottawa had been accompanied by even a moderate slide in the standings, Ottawa general manager John Muckler -- in his first season on the job after succeeding Marshall Johnston -- might have been able to stand in front of a news conference and muse that he knew of the distractions, but that Martin's voice no longer was being heard. NHL teams have changed coaches something like an average of 2.82 times apiece since the first time stories speculated Martin was on the verge being fired.

And yet the Senators played on.

We're not going to canonize a group of highly paid athletes -- and even the players on a mid-level payroll team are highly paid -- for demonstrating enough professionalism and pride to press on. The Sens weren't in soup lines or at the bottom of freeway ramps, and they knew their money was coming eventually, but they didn't even let it be a temporary blip. And Martin deserves credit for that.

The biggest mystery of his tenure with the Senators is why his capability so often has been doubted. His broad base of experience -- including Canadian college hockey, that Memorial Cup championship with the Platers and in the AHL -- demonstrates a facility for teaching and patience, as well as decision-making. If the tendency of the next wave of hiring is recently retired NHL players who "understand" the modern athlete, Martin will be an antithesis. He's a teacher. As the league has changed over the past 15 years, he has been as adaptive as any NHL coach, and that even includes going along with the addition of some toughness -- both in terms of personnel and approach -- as this year's playoffs approach.

Until the definition of the award is changed, the Senators' playoff problems under Martin can't be held against him in the Adams race.

His work, and his team's play, this season present compelling arguments. The standard for the Adams involves a sliding set of standards, adjusted annually, as they should be. It involves an intuitive feel for whether the best job that season was done by someone who didn't foul up great talent (an underrated accomplishment) or nudged a decent, not great, roster to maximum achievement. Heck, the last time Scotty Bowman won the award, in 1996, he drove his players both nuts and to the league record for victories. In some ways, he did better work in his final seven seasons, backing away a bit from his mind games. But that was pure Bowman, knowing how to adapt.

But it comes down to getting the most out of what you have, whether that means the job Adams winner Bobby Francis did with the Coyotes last season just to make the playoffs, or the work Joel Quenneville did with the Blues three years ago.

Only a spoilsport would point out what happened the last time a coach who worked under GM John Muckler won the Adams Trophy. Buffalo's Ted Nolan was the choice in 1998. Muckler, who had been feuding with his coach, was fired. Nolan turned down the Sabres' subsequent and insulting offer of a one-year extension. And he hasn't worked since.

Terry Frei is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. His book, Simon and Schuster's "Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming," is available nationwide.