Dan Bylsma’s advice from his younger self led him on path to coaching Kraken
SEATTLE – Dan Bylsma was an alternate captain for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, but in a 12-year pro career spent only four full seasons at the NHL level. Many times he was called into the coach’s office and was told he’d be sent to the minors, before eventually switching to the other side of the desk. He still draws on those experiences.
Roughly halfway through his pro years, he realized he wanted to be a coach one day.
“I would have played forever if I could have,” Bylsma said. “But six years in, I started taking notes and writing things down and keeping a journal about how I wanted to coach.”
Bylsma is a big reader. In his previous stop with the Kraken’s minor-league affiliate, he introduced a curated bookshelf of 100 titles that Coachella Valley Firebirds players and staff were welcome to borrow from, with a tongue-twister of a nickname: The “Bylbrary.” He also co-authored four books with his father, Jay, during his playing career, including, “So Your Son Wants to Play in the NHL.”
His stack of 20 or so journals, he says, will not make up the fifth. They’re for in-house use only. He looks back on them, mostly in the summers. They serve as reminders of the coaching he appreciated as a player and the one he wants to be now.
The early ones are in cursive. Some are serious, worn, leather-bound tomes. The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins days are in composition books.
“Occasionally I made a mistake of having just a yellow notepad, and they don’t last,” Bylsma said. Chunks of those are referred to as “the lost pages.”
He flipped through them after his last NHL head coaching job in Buffalo ended with his 2017 firing. Bylsma had strung together coaching gigs, back-to-back and increasingly scrutinized, since just a few months after retiring as a player. He’s been on a steady climb for a decade. He’d gotten his name on the Stanley Cup. But for a few years, he took a relative step back. He joined the ownership group of a junior hockey team and took a job as an assistant coach with the Detroit Red Wings.
“I think I needed to discover the joy of coaching again and change a little bit in establishing relationships with the players,” he said after he was named the Kraken’s second head coach in May. And he meant that.
So he revisited those handwritten thoughts, the forgotten wisdom they contained.
“I’m bringing those lessons that I’ve learned the last couple years,” Bylsma said.
“The opportunity to coach in Charlotte and (Coachella Valley) the last couple years reinvigorated my passion and energy for the team and for the players. Sometimes the bright lights and the big job can take away from that.”
He also consulted with some of the players he’d coached a long time ago.
“Make sure you’re bringing that crazy Disco Dan to the table,” they advised him.
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Everyone wants to know the story behind the nickname, which is a shame, because it’s nowhere near his best material. In a nutshell, around 1994, while playing for the Phoenix Roadrunners of the now-defunct International Hockey League, someone else was already using his generic moniker “Bysie.” Inspired by his dance moves, teammates started calling him Danny Disco, and eventually Disco Dan.
Bylsma was born in time for the disco era in 1970, the fourth Bylsma brother. A sister joined the family later. They played just about every established sport in western Michigan and made up a few more.
There wasn’t a lot of hockey opportunity beyond the amateur level in his area, and he wanted to follow one of his brothers to Bowling Green State University in Ohio. So he made the hard decision to leave home to play junior hockey in Ontario and would return in time for the high school baseball season.
He continued to straddle that line, and actually went to Bowling Green to play baseball but was told to pick one or the other. Hockey was it, and his bold penalty killing got him into the school record books. As of 2015, he was one of two players in school history to score two short-handed goals in the same game in 1989. He was also the first – and until recently, only – player in Falcon history to score a 3-on-5 short-handed goal, the game-winner right off a faceoff at Western Michigan on Dec. 6, 1991.
He killed a lot of penalties at the NHL level as well. The defensive-minded forward toiled in the AHL, ECHL and IHL before making his debut with the L.A. Kings in 1995. He was made an alternate captain his first season with the rebuilding Mighty Ducks in 2000-01. His best statistical season was the next one, when he chipped in eight goals and nine assists in 77 games.
He retired at the end of the 2003-04 season and began his coaching career with the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks, Anaheim’s AHL affiliate that he’d been playing for just a few months earlier. Days after getting back from a large golf weekend with teammates, he found out he’d gotten the job.
“I called them up and said: ‘Scratch all that stuff from your memories. I’m going to be your coach next year,’” he said.
One of them was four-time Stanley Cup champion Chris Kunitz. Bylsma said Kunitz never called him Disco again. It was always “coach.”
So that was the day “Disco” died. The two went on to win the 2009 title together in Pittsburgh, Bylsma as the Penguins’ midseason replacement coach and Kunitz as a player.
With the Kraken, the nickname has been “experiencing a resurgence,” Bylsma said. Today’s young players aren’t as concerned with locker-room formalities as Kunitz was, and they love a bit. Twenty-year-old Kraken prospect Ty Nelson jumped on the nickname immediately. He’s welcome to do it.
“Same old Dan,” said Kraken forward Shane Wright, reportedly one of the frequent Bylbrary patrons. “Same fun guy.”
The guys Bylsma coached in the minors are familiar with his methods and antics and full of praise. That includes forwards Wright and Tye Kartye and goaltender Joey Daccord.
“I think you can already feel a little bit of a culture shift, the energy and the passion that everyone has at the rink every single day,” Daccord said. “It’s been a lot of fun already.”
Veteran Jordan Eberle was never a Firebird, but in the first few days of training camp, noted Bylsma’s renewed passion.
“He’s like me – he loves being at the rink,” Eberle said. “He loves being around the guys. Personally, I love playing for coaches like that.”
Kraken winger Jared McCann detected a “lighthearted spirit.”
“He brings a level of energy to our team that I think we were missing,” McCann said.
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Bylsma’s raucous 54th birthday, which happened to fall on the first day of training camp, involved wife Mary Beth preparing all his favorite foods and an early bedtime.
It’s no wonder he’s turning in early these days. During practice he can be found all over the ice, even crouched on the ice, sticking out his legs as obstructions, standing in front of the net without wearing pads. Sometimes, unfortunately, he succeeds in blocking a shot.
Welcome back to the NHL, coach?
“Whether we’ve won all the games or not, there’s always a grind for the next one,” Bylsma said. “That’s a fun part of coaching, but it takes a lot of energy. You don’t get a lot of sleep doing it, but there’s the offseason (for that).”
Mary Beth was a decorated college gymnast and inducted into the Bowling Green Hall of Fame years before Dan. Making the decision to go into coaching, he said, was an “us decision.” All the moving around and the late nights are probably tougher on the families than the players, he said.
She’s watched a lot of hockey in her day.
“She has the athlete mindset as well,” Bylsma said. “The guys don’t know it, but she’s their encourager.”
There’s some of that going around. As the players said, there’s a different, upbeat tone at Kraken Community Iceplex. Bylsma is intent on bringing a renewed passion and energy to this next head coaching stint. He’s taken his sabbatical and he’s done his homework. The journey is documented.
Welcome back to the NHL, coach.
“World’s fastest game, highest level,” Bylsma said as camp opened. “And the group we get to do it with is pretty exciting to be able to do it with.”