Glass half-full in terms of potential
Portland Winterhawks centre could be headed to Vancouver but needs to get bigger, stronger
Mike Johnston sees something of Ryan Johansen in Cody Glass. If you’re a Vancouver Canucks fan, that may be code for “he’ll be worth the wait,” should the team use its No. 5 overall selection in the NHL Draft in Chicago next month on this latest high-end Portland Winterhawks centre.
Glass, who recorded 32 goals and 94 points this past regular season for Portland, is one of the players being connected to the Canucks after Saturday’s draft lottery slotted the opening round selection order.
For a second consecutive year the Canucks dropped in the lottery. Last year, the Canucks fell from third to fifth and selected defenceman Olli Juolevi of the OHL’s London Knights. This year, Vancouver, the league’s 29th-placed team, entered the lottery with the second-best odds (12.1 per cent) at the first overall pick behind only the Colorado Avalanche, but will once again select fifth overall.
“You have an 80 per cent chance of not winning, and I think what we saw this year is going to be normal for the lottery,” said Canucks president Trevor Linden. “Our best chance was to move down and we did.”
The New Jersey Devils were the big winner, moving up from No. 5 to earn the top selection in June’s NHL Draft while the Philadelphia Flyers were the biggest movers at Saturday’s lottery. Philadelphia came in with just a 2.2 per cent shot at the top pick and wound up with the No. 2 overall selection. Dallas rounded out the top three.
TSN’s Craig Button, for one, had Vancouver using its first choice on Glass, 18, in his latest mock draft.
Johnston returned to Portland this past season as general manager and coach after two seasons away, including a stint running the Pittsburgh Penguins bench. Johnston was also at the controls of the Winterhawks when Johansen was their star pivot, including his 2010 draft year, when he went fourth overall to the Columbus Blue Jackets after a 25-goal, 69-point campaign.
“Cody’s a 200-foot centre who moves the puck well,” said Johnston, a Canucks assistant coach back in the Marc Crawford regime. “He sees everybody on the ice. He can produce obviously offensively, but at Christmas time we made him into a penalty killer as well, because we wanted him to work on all areas of his game, and he quickly became our top penalty-killing forward. It shows you what he can do.
“He hasn’t come close to what he’s going to be physically, though. He’s like Johansen at that age. He still has to fill out.”
The 6-foot-2, 179-pound, right-handed shooting Glass has draw decent reviews for his skating, particularly when he gets up to top speed. Johnston thinks it will improve as he gets stronger, which leads to further comparisons to Johansen.
Johansen, who’s also a right-handed shot, was listed at 6-foot-2 and 192 pounds in his draft year. He now checks in at 6-foot-3 and 218 pounds, and is a centrepiece of a Nashville Predators side that looks to be a Stanley Cup contender.
He had 14 goals and 61 points in the regular season. He’s had as many 71 points in a campaign. He had 21 points, including nine goals, in 67 games as a 19-year-old rookie in 2011-12.
“Cody has a nice stride, but he doesn’t have a lot of pop in his stride,” Johnston said. “I’ve talked to him about needing three-step quickness, and that will come with more power and training. Johansen didn’t have three-step quickness. He’s very similar to Johansen in a lot of ways.
“People complained about some things with Johansen’s game his first couple of years, but, by year three, the complaints began to stop. And look at him now in these playoffs — he’s a big, strong, two-way centre.”
Asked if Glass might be ready to play full-time in the NHL next season, Johnston said: “I don’t want to take it away from him but I don’t know. Ryan played at 19 and even that was a stretch and Cody’s a little bit slimmer. I know how tough it is. I saw (Nino) Niederreiter and Johansen play some games at 18 and come back to us.”
Travis Green, the new Canucks coach, worked alongside Johnston as assistant coach and assistant general manager with the Winterhawks from 2010-13, but had moved on to guiding the Canucks’ AHL Utica Comets farm team when the Winterhawks used the 19th overall pick in the 2014 WHL bantam draft to select Glass.
The Canucks have also been linked to Minnesota high school centre Casey Mittelstadt, and there’s a school of thought that they may take a defenceman with their first pick as well.
“He hasn’t come close to what he’s going to be physically, though.” — Portland coach and GM Mike Johnston