Capitals head coach Spencer Carbery is still learning new tricks in his third season as an NHL head coach.
During an appearance on ESPN’s ‘The Drop’ podcast with Greg Wyshynski and Arda Ocal on Monday, Carbery spoke on his reading habits. While he does pick up books written by coaches, he revealed his primary reading fodder doesn’t come from the sports world.
“I’m more of a business book person,” he told Wyshynski.
Carbery noted that he also enjoys books about more general leadership principles. As for his favorites, he recommended the works of stoic philosophy author Ryan Holiday.
“So I’ve been reading a lot of Ryan Holiday, and I know it’s not necessarily strictly, like, business and how he correlates it. It’s more on leadership,” Carbery said. “I read a lot of his stuff. And he sent me, actually — ‘(The) Obstacle Is the Way’ is a great read if you haven’t read that.”
Carbery is hardly the first sports figure to embrace Holiday’s self-help work, which has become a frequent read of players and management alike. Capitals president of hockey operations Brian MacLellan recommended “The Obstacle is The Way” back in 2019 for The Athletic, explaining how the ideology relates to sports.
“Stoicism philosophy about the distinction between what you can control and what you can’t – obstacles – bad games, slumps, poor calls,” MacLellan said then. “The hardest part of pro sports is to detach yourself from the day-to-day emotion about losing a game … how do we keep focus on our process – what we do and execute it.”
Senators defenseman Jake Sanderson has embraced stoicism after reading Holiday’s writings, and former Capitals forward Garnet Hathaway recalled then-Calgary Flames head coach Glen Gulutzan quoting him during his time with the team, a memory that’s stuck with him close to a decade later.
Holiday has also garnered a significant following in the NFL and has visited the headquarters of the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.
“Stoicism is the distinction between what you can control and what you can’t,” Holiday told Sports Illustrated in 2015. “That’s probably the hardest idea of pro sports—that you have to detach yourself from the results and focus exclusively on what you do and do it well. You can’t get mad about missing the shot, or losing a game, or calls that went against you. You have to focus on what you were supposed to do and whether you did it right.”
After the Capitals’ Eastern Conference-leading season in 2024-25, Carbery was named the NHL’s coach of the year, winning the Jack Adams Award and becoming the only coach in hockey history to win the best coach award in the NHL, AHL, and ECHL.
