We propose an adaptive prioritizing soft handoff algorithm for concurrent handoff requests aiming at a same cell. A predicted set, an adaptive priority profile jointly exploiting the impact of required handoff power and call holding time have been developed to realize the proposed algorithm. A link-layer scheduler residing in each base station to ensure the desired operation of the prioritizing procedure is also designed. Numerical results are acquired through comparing the proposed algorithm with no-prioritizing scenario and performance gain is obtained in terms of handoff dropping probability, average guard power utilization, and average guard power efficiency, by no less than 24%, 5%, respectively for the first two criteria, and some amount for the last.