2024 Minto Cup Final Preview: Coquitlam Adanacs vs. Orangeville Northmen
The 2024 Minto Cup Final is set, and while it features the two teams most assumed would make it, things didn’t go precisely as planned for either of this year’s finalists.
Tuesday’s 13-9 semifinal win over the Port Coquitlam Saints sent the Orangeville Northmen to the tournament’s best-of-three series finale against the Coquitlam Adanacs.
It will be the fifth time these two Junior A lacrosse powers have met in the Minto Cup Finals. Here’s how those previous encounters went:
1993
Orangeville wins best-of-seven series 4-0
This was the Northmen’s first finals appearance, and obviously first win too. Current Orangeville Head Coach, Rusty Kruger, played on the team that year and was a major contributor to that season’s success. At the time, the decisive series loss put Coquitlam at 0-3 at the Minto, which was still an Ontario versus British Columbia-only affair. The Northmen would go on to win two more Cups over the next three summers, but…
Mark Matthews & Riley Loewen (Photo: Ward Laforme Jr.)
2010
Coquitlam wins best-of-three series 2-0
Coquitlam would only return to the Minto seventeen summers later, where they would again see Orangeville in the series finale. The Cup was now contested in a four-team tournament format (round robin games, a single semifinal, plus a constantly changing format for the final) that now included Alberta. The win came on the same floor this year’s Minto will be awarded, the Palace on Poirier in Coquitlam.
2012
Orangeville wins best-of-three series 2-0
Beat up by both Orangeville and Whitby during the round-robin stage, Coquitlam still found a way to sneak into that year’s final. Even though they upset the Warriors in the semifinals (15-11), the Northmen proved way too powerful a round later, which included a severely one-sided 19-6 score in Game 1. That year’s Northmen were also one of the very few provincial seeds lower than a one or two to win the title. Orangeville, who finished third in the OJLL during the regular season in 2012, are one of only five seeds lower than two to capture a Minto Cup. This year, both Orangeville and Coquitlam entered the tournament as their province’s top seed, while the Saints and Raiders Lacrosse Club were their league’s second seeds.
2016
Coquitlam wins best-of-five series 3-2
The two teams continued to trade the title, the Adanacs winning this since abandoned best-of-five final, and for the first time, it wasn’t a sweep. Although that year’s Minto was held out west, it was hosted at the Langley Events Centre, not the Palace.
Their Minto tale-of-the-tape is tied at two, but not for long. Below, The Lax Mag tells you why each team is capable of winning this year’s Cup, but also why they won’t.
Coquitlam Adanacs
Why They’ll Win
Because the Adanacs dominated the BJCALL regular season and playoffs, finished first during the round-robin stage at the Minto, have the most stacked squad they’ve had since 2016, and have not lost a Minto on their home floor in over three decades – winning at the Palace in 2010. We also have yet to see the Adanacs at their absolute from top-to-bottom best during this year’s tournament. It’s true. Most of their top talent have still not maxed out in most critical on-floor categories, possibly saving those performances for when it matters most. To fumble this year’s final, Coquitlam would obviously need to lose twice in as many as three games. That has only happened once all year, the Adanacs dropping back-to-back regular season results to the Burnaby Lakers in mid-ish June. The Northmen lost two in either two or three game stretches twice this year – early during the regular season to the Brampton Excelsiors and Mimico Mountaineers, and then again to Mimico in the OJLL Finals, allowing the Mounties back into a series they had control of early on (up 2-0 but needed seven games to finally win).
Why They Won’t
Because they’ve already lost to a Northmen lineup that sat several stars (load management) in the team’s highly anticipated round-robin contest that made the Adanacs look average in a game that kind didn’t matter, but also really did. Officials are calling games much tighter as the tourney has progressed, and so far, Orangeville’s special teams seem superior to the Adanacs’ uneven effort. In fact, Coquitlam collected just six total minutes in penalties during their first two games of the Minto against the Raiders and Saints, but then 20 versus the ornery Horn Heads, who scored four times a man up and forced Coquitlam defenders to play their most demanding Minto minutes yet. On Tuesday, the Saints took a silly sum of stupid penalties (and turnovers) against the Northmen in the semis, and those many mistakes made it difficult to keep up with arguably the tournament’s strongest offensive unit, who were locked in on lethal level throughout that win.
After a regular season game earlier this year, Coquitlam Head Coach Pat Coyle told his players (as documented in Road to the Minto Cup), “All they were was in our way…that means we don’t really acknowledge them, we don’t really fucking engage with them. All we’re thinking about is winning the game. So, they’re just in our way. Every fucking team we play this year are just in our fucking way.” That wasn’t the case on Monday, but will need to be if they hope to overcome Orangeville the rest of the way.
Orangeville Northmen
Why They’ll Win
Because the Northmen have many of those same bullets we opened the Adanacs Why They’ll Win with above, but Orangeville is also very clearly in Coquitlam’s heads as evidenced in that round-robin result this past Monday. The opposite may have been true if Coquitlam had capitalized and body bagged Orangeville’s backup backstop (Lindyn Hill was outstanding) and handful of reserve players (their bench depth was incredible). That did not happen. Not even close. Head Coach Rusty Kruger’s gamble of sitting several of his star players to rest them for the semis and beyond could not have worked out better. While the Adanacs were the more penalized team in that game, it was the Northmen whose physical and fast defensive game overwhelmed and even intimidated the Adanacs throughout most of the game’s sixty minutes. “It really gets the juices flowing seeing how physical Orangeville is being,” said the Adanacs’ 2010 Minto Cup-winning captain, Matt Beers, during Monday’s first intermission interview. “I wouldn’t stand for that right now. They’re really taking it to them.” Missing on Monday, the likes of Joey Spallina, Trey Deere, Liam Matthews, Aiden Long and others will be on the COQ vs. ORA game sheet this time, and even though the Northmen are the lower seed heading into this series, they feel more like favourites TBH. In our Instagram poll asking who would win this series, 61% of our nearly 43K followers picked the Northmen. While our X poll will remain open right up until the start of the series, the results as of publishing this preview were similar, 60% going with Orangeville.
Rusty Kruger (Photo: Dave Fryer/OJLL)
Why They Won’t
As we’ve recently outlined on this site and social media, history is not on the Northmen’s side. The list:
Only one team since 2003 have lost the first game of the tournament and still won the Minto Cup. The Northmen opened this year with a shocking L, and that one past Minto win wasn’t them.
Only four teams since 2003 that needed to play in the semifinal went on to win the Cup. The Northmen played and won this year’s semi, but again, they’ve never before been forced to play a SF game and then also won the Cup. In fact, the two other times they’ve won a semifinal at the Minto, they’ve’ gone on to lose the Cup to…(dramatic pause)…Coquitlam. Gasp.
Although they’ve won a Minto in British Columbia (2019 in Langley), the last time Orangeville competed for a Cup in the city of Coquitlam, they lost it to the Adanacs (2010).
Plus, while Monday’s extra day of rest for a handful of their top names seemingly made a difference in the semifinals, the Northmen have played more lacrosse this year than any team in Canada, including a gruelling full seven-game series against the Mimico Mountaineers in the OJLL Finals. Here’s how many/few games the Minto’s final two have played this summer…
Coquitlam
Regular Season: 18
Playoffs: 7
Minto Cup: 3
Total: 28
Orangeville
Regular Season: 20
Playoffs: 13
Minto Cup: 4
Total: 37
When all is said and done, Orangeville may have played 40 games over the season, already collecting far more minutes than Cup-contending Coquitlam this year. In recent memory, the only Minto-winning team to top 40 games in one season were the 2013 Whitby Warriors (41). The big difference between that season and this one was that the team the Warriors saw in the Minto Finals, the New Westminster Salmonbellies, had 38 GPs. The BCJALL regular season dropped from a 21-game season to 18 this year. The only time over the last number of decades the BCJALL seasons didn’t include 21 games was during the pandemic and in 2022, when they ended their regular season early (14 games) and squished in their playoffs to avoid conflict with the World Lacrosse Men's U21 World Championship in Limerick, Ireland that summer. The move didn’t prove lucky, however, as that year’s Minto rep, the Victoria Shamrocks, finished dead last in the tournament.