DRAFT DODGER
LIGHTNING: Little guy who kept being passed over in the draft is now leading the way in the NHL playoffs
Tyler Johnson was passed over — over and over — by NHL teams when he was starring with the WHL Spokane Chiefs. Now he leads the Stanley Cup playoffs with 11 goals.
The kid was small — there was no getting around that. But you just had to look at his other numbers to think maybe, just maybe, he had something that couldn’t be measured in feet and pounds.
As a 17-year-old with the Spokane Chiefs, he was named the MVP of the WHL playoffs and played a leading role on a Memorial Cup championship team. And nobody drafted him. His second year with the Chiefs he averaged a point a game and, again, no one invested so much as a seventh-rounder in Tyler Johnson. His third year, you ask? He upped his point total while helping lead the U.S. to a gold medal at the world juniors. It goes without saying: no one drafted him.
It wasn’t until his fourth year in Spokane, when he recorded 53 goals and 62 assists, that the NHL began to take him seriously. With Steve Yzerman leading the charge, the Tampa Bay Lightning would step up and sign Johnson to a free-agent contract.
You can now see Johnson in the Eastern Conference final, where he leads the NHL playoffs in scoring. But he’s still very small. “It wasn’t that he was passed over once,” says Tim Speltz, the longtime Chiefs GM who had a front-row seat for the Johnny show in Spokane.
“It was three times. And we didn’t think we’d get him back as an overager because he was good enough to play in the minors.”
Did we mention Johnson also went to NHL camps with Phoenix and Minnesota as an undrafted player and was never offered a contract?
“Everybody understood he was a dominant junior,” Speltz says.
“The deterrent was obviously his size. But the thing about Johnny is he’s got an unbelievable motor and the faster the game, the better he plays. That’s what we saw and what we’re seeing now. The game is never too fast for him.”
Funny, you’d think someone else would have noticed.
Johnson, of course, is the It-player of this year’s playoffs, an overnight sensation who’s become the talk of the Stanley Cup tournament. He has 11 goals and 16 points in 15 games. His most recent outing was a bravura three-goal performance against the New York Rangers on Monday night.
Two years ago, few people outside of western Washington knew his name but, suddenly, Johnson is overshadowing Steven Stamkos, Corey Perry and Jonathan Toews — an undrafted free agent, a kid from Spokane every NHL team passed on three years running. It’s a remarkable story. Then again, Speltz says he’s a remarkable young man.
“I know you hear this a lot, but Johnny isn’t just a special player,” he says. “He’s a special person. He’s the all-American boy. When he was with us, he was an honours student who lived at home and went to his own high school. He still donates his time in this area.
“He seems too good to be true, but he’s that guy.”
Which is something the rest of the hockey world is coming to realize.
Speltz first saw Johnson in the late 1990s when Mike Babcock was coaching the Chiefs and the team practised at a rink in suburban Spokane which was built by former NFL quarterback Mark Rypien. Johnson’s mother Debbie was the powerskating coach at the facility and her young son was frequently in tow.
“There was this little guy who was always there,” Speltz says.
In minor hockey, Johnson was coached by his father Ken, who gave his son a solid grounding in the game’s fundamentals and would drive him to Vancouver for spring and summer hockey at the North Shore Winter Club.
The Chiefs would take him, naturally, in the 11th round of the 2005 bantam draft and, naturally, there was zero interest in Johnson from the college ranks. Prior to his first season with the Chiefs, he was also cut by the USHL’s Tri-City Storm.
By then, Speltz says, the Chiefs were convinced they had something in the hometown kid and during his first season, he played an integral role for the Memorial Cup champions. That team was coached by current Hurricanes head coach Bill Peters and featured NHLers Jared Cowan, Justin Faulk, Dustin Tokarski and Jared Spurgeon.
Johnson, however, would be named the WHL’s playoff MVP, largely for his defensive work.
“We played him against the other team’s top players,” Speltz says.
“He was the biggest reason we won that year.”
His game, unlike the rest of him, would grow, but still scouts were suspicious of Johnson, who’s ambitiously listed at 5-foot-8 and 183 pounds.
It wasn’t until his fourth year in Spokane, when he posted huge offensive numbers, that the NHL came calling and, by then, the Lightning were sitting on a winning lottery ticket.
With current Lightning head coach Jon Cooper behind the bench and Johnson scoring 31 goals in his first year of pro, the Norfolk Admirals would win the Calder Cup.
Two years later, Johnson was a finalist for the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year. That brings us to this season and his coming-out party in the playoffs. “He’s very humble,” Speltz says. “A reporter called and asked how he could get Johnny to talk about himself. I said, ‘Good luck with that.’ ”
But others are only too willing to talk about Johnson these days.
It’s funny. Every year there are scores of young prospects who are deemed too small to make it in the NHL and, for the most part, they are eliminated by the laws of natural selection.
But for every 100 who don’t make it, there’s a Theo Fleury, a Marty St. Louis, a Patrick Kane. All those players have great talent but they’re also separated by something intrinsic, something in their makeup which won’t allow them to fail.
Now there’s Tyler Johnson, whose greatest skill is that he wouldn’t let himself be defined by others.