Meet Danton Danielson, the head coach of the Prince Albert Mintos. (Jeff D'Andrea/paNOW Staff)

By Jeff D'Andrea

Meet the Mintos' new bench boss

Mintos’ new bench boss runnin’ up from Saskatoon

Aug 18, 2019 | 2:08 PM

Prince Albert and Saskatoon have a well-established rivalry when it comes to hockey, but Saskatoon’s Danton Danielson in more than happy to bridge that gap.

After establishing himself at the Bantam AA level with the Saskatoon Outlaws, Danielson left the Bridge City to take over as the Prince Albert Mintos’ head coach for the upcoming season. When Danielson was looking to make the jump to Midget AAA, the Mintos were always high on his list of destinations.

“I’m Saskatoon born and raised, and I cut my teeth coaching in the minor hockey system there. The Mintos have always been seen as the marquee organization here in the province, as far as where you want to be,” Danielson said. “Everything from how the team is organized and run, Donny [Fauchoux, Mintos manager] and the guys do a great of that—tremendous amount of board support. When you’re thinking about making a move to try and coach at the next level, things like that play pretty highly into the decision.”

The Mintos reputation speaks for itself. The club has won three Telus Cup championships, third most all time, including back-to-back championships in 2006 and 2007, having most recently won it in 2014. They also have yet to lose a game at the national championship. In league play, the Mintos have regularly been in the mix for the top spot.

But after the glory of their 2014 Telus winning season, the Mintos’ success has tapered off. Since then, they’ve been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs four times, and once in the second round. The only exception was when they got to the finals in the 2017-18 season, losing to the eventual Telus winning Notre Dame Hounds.

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But Danielson credited Ken Morrison and the rest of last year’s Mintos coaching staff in developing a team that was young and relied heavily on a crop of 15-year-old rookies. He hopes to build on that.

“The guys did a good job last year, the group [of coaches] that came before me, in moulding those guys as first-year players. Hopefully this year, we’re going to reap the benefits of what they did,” Danielson said. “When you have a young team one year, you have a good chance at having an older group the next year and having some players return. It looks like we’re going to have a pretty good crop of returning guys.

“Our scouts and our organization have done a good job of identifying a few other key pieces to add to that mix,” Danielson added. “It looks like this year, it might be a pretty strong group. You don’t win championships in August, but what we’re looking at here this weekend, things are shaping up pretty well.”

One big thing that makes Danielson rather unique at this level is his ability to gather and utilize analytics and advanced statistics as part of his strategy. He used it to success at the Bantam AA level and hopes to establish the new-school approach to coaching again moving forward with the Mintos.

“It’s another tool in the toolbox of coaching. You don’t make all decisions based on one piece of information, regardless of what that information is. Anytime you can use stats and you have that information available to you that sheds one more piece of light on a situation, you’re always going to take advantage of that, at least I am,” Danielson said. “So hopefully we’ll be able to set up a similar kind of process to what I’ve had in the past. That takes resources and man-power and put the time in to collect that information, but as long as we can set that up, we can use it.”

What Danielson hopes to achieve in his time with the Mintos is to establish a high-flying, offensive style of play that fans can enjoy watching.

“I think we’re going to have a fun team to watch. We’re planning to play an interesting style, pretty up-pace, pretty offensive style of hockey,” Danielson said. “It’ll be pretty fun to watch. I’m really excited to be part of this community and I hope people will come out and support us.”

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Jeff.dandrea@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @jeff_paNOW