Coming off a forgettable 2-30-4 season in 2012-13, the Sacred Heart University coaching staff knew it needed to bring in some elite talent to change the program’s fortunes. Always fighting the recruiting battle against the bigger names in the region, they knew they would have to find some hidden gems.
As assistant coach Scott McDougall began his recruiting, he got a tip from a former men’s league teammate. “(Dan Stewart) called me and said there’s a couple kids on our team here in Cobourg (Ontario) that are really good, and you’ve got to come watch them,” McDougall said.
Trusting his friend’s advice, McDougall made the trek north. He would find a pair of talents in Canada (eventual captain Evan Jasper also would be brought into the fold), but one stood out more than others.
“We really targeted Justin,” McDougall said. “He, for me, was the crown jewel of our recruiting efforts that year.”
In the first game of Justin Danforth’s college career, his Sacred Heart Pioneers walked into Tsongas Arena and stunned the then No. 1-ranked UMass Lowell River Hawks. With 13 freshmen on that 2013-14 roster, opening with such a statement win provided the confidence boost a struggling team needed to raise expectations.
The future was looking bright in Fairfield. Danforth did not register a point in that upset, but like his 12 peers, coaches were hoping he would be a key factor in changing the fortunes of the program.
Danforth certainly did everything he could to fulfill that ambition. By season’s end, the freshman forward found himself on top of Sacred Heart’s scoring chart with 29 points. It was a position he would hold in three of his four seasons in Connecticut.
“The guys in that class, in some respect, looked up to him,” McDougall said, adding, “He was never in the discussion, in his entire career, of not being a guy that we were going to be counting on in every situation.”
With 22 points as a sophomore (the lone season he didn’t lead the team in scoring), Danforth experienced only brief struggles at the collegiate level. He insists it wasn’t an easy transition, although he admits his freshman success made it difficult to swallow the (relative) sophomore slump. “My second year of college wasn’t a great year for me in hockey. I remember that second year in college being a tough one … maybe being a little too confident or taking the foot off the gas. It’s never easy to have a tough year like that.”
With 41 points as a junior, Danforth proved that his freshman outbreak was no fluke. More surprisingly, with 20 goals in that season, the work he had put into rounding out his game was paying off.
“After that sophomore year, I really put a lot of work into my shot, learned how to score goals,” he said. “It was kind of a weird year. Every time I seemed to get a good opportunity to score, I’d score. My linemate, Evan Jasper … he was just, at some points, giving me gifts back door.”
Danforth needed just eight points to hit 100 as a senior, and he put up four times that target total, finishing his Sacred Heart career with 124 points. It is still a fairly young program, but his production puts Danforth high on the program’s all-time rankings. Although he couldn’t bring the desired team success along with his individual prowess, Danforth laid a strong foundation that resonates today.
“He was a great ambassador for our program,” McDougall said. “Justin’s a worker. He’s a guy that all coaches really like. He works. He’s competitive. He comes to work every day with a plan. He’s a pro.”
After that final game at Sacred Heart, Danforth had cups of coffee with Reading in the East Coast Hockey League, then Bridgeport and Rochester in the American Hockey League. The undrafted forward scored two goals in six AHL games, proving that he could hack it at the higher levels. The short stint provided a big boost.
“I was still unsure about how I could do at the pro level,” Danforth said. “I didn’t know how well I could do at the AHL level, or even the East Coast level, so getting those couple goals — and I played some good hockey in Rochester — it made me understand that this isn’t far-fetched for me, that this is very doable.”
Danforth would start the next season in the ECHL, this time with Cincinnati, but again he would earn his way to Rochester. He wasn’t scoring at the same rate in the ‘A’ as in the Coast, but he certainly was proving he belonged in the professional ranks.
“The small details in my game kind of held me back a little bit with the trust and stuff with coaches,” he said about his first few games in the AHL. “They worked with me, when I was in Rochester. They told me what I could get better at, which was very helpful. I could feel that the coaches were trusting me more. I was playing a lot more, playing a more important role.”
Yet, with the realization that working one’s way from an undrafted uncertainty to the top would be a daunting prospect, he began to set his sights on Europe. It was something that had been in the back of his mind. With many in his circle telling him he had a style fit for Europe, Danforth started looking at that avenue.
“That was a tough decision,” he said about crossing the pond. “It wasn’t a decision I just made overnight. Not a lot of guys get that opportunity to go to Finland, which is a great league. I just wanted to take a different path.”
Danforth made the move to the Finnish city of Rauma with a justifiable amount of confidence. Still, the league did require some adjusting, and he did have a couple doubts early on.
“(Last year) coming into Finland, there was definitely pressure,” he said. “Preseason, there was a lot of transition. You’re almost learning a different way to play hockey. We had about eight preseason games. Those preseason games were tough. I was a bit worried. I was thinking, ‘Can I play at this level? Can I play this type of hockey?’ ”
Both of those questions would be emphatically answered soon enough. Despite starting out slower than he had wanted, Danforth began accumulating his normal heap of points. When the season finally closed, he occupied the fifth spot in the league.
Entering this year, Danforth was hoping to avoid the sophomore slump he suffered at Sacred Heart. True to form, the tireless worker wasn’t going to rest on his laurels.
“(My sophomore season was) a huge learning experience going forward in my career, and realizing that even if you have a good year that the next year’s not going to be easier,” Danforth said. “You need to keep working and keep getting better at your game because there’s a lot of players around the world that are getting better and working at their game every day.”
Just as at Sacred Heart, when he boosted his goal totals from five and seven his first two seasons to 20 as a junior, Danforth is on pace to best his goal totals from last season. If he maintains his near point-a-game pace, he should edge out last season’s point total, and potentially hit the 60-point mark.
Already an assistant captain in Finland, he’s now trying to find a way to get the team to follow suit, and find the group success that eluded him in Connecticut.
Lukko is in good shape, sitting in the middle of the playoff pack, but Danforth hopes the team can shoot a little higher.
“At the start of the year, we won maybe eight of our first 10 games,” he said. “I think if we get back to playing a little bit more simple and being a bit smarter with our offensive reads, it will help us in the long run. I think we have a really good team, so I think it’s just a matter of time before we start stringing together some wins.”
