As he has always done, Tyler Johnson fixes his eyes on the goal.
The Tampa Bay Lightning’s smallest forward collides with the Toronto Maple Leafs heaviest defenceman, Tim Gleason, a man 35 pounds heavier, Wednesday night at the blue line. But while Leafs Nation inflates the Air Canada Centre with pleas for an interference call, the five-foot-nine rookie bounces off the big man and busts toward the net, stick on the ice, ready to strike.
In a flash, Johnson converts a Ryan Malone pass, secures the 22nd goal of his freshman season, gifts his playoff-bound Bolts with a two-goal cushion in a four-point game, and sucks the energy out of the ACC attendees, suddenly concerned about their own team’s playoff shot.
Regardless of the size of the obstacle in his way, Jon Cooper says Tyler Johnson will find a way to either go around it or through it. The Lightning coach is speaking about the figurative roadblock life throws in front of us, but on Wednesday night the obstacle was six feet tall, 217 pounds and Johnson went through him, controversial non-call be damned.
“I’m just standing on the blue line; he runs into me. It’s one of those plays in my mind that can go either way, whatever the ref sees. I can’t do anything in that scenario, and I know he can’t either,” Johnson says after pulling within one of Calder Trophy favourite Nathan MacKinnon’s rookie-leading 23 goals. “You can’t be thinking that they might call something. You just keep playing until there’s a whistle.”
Maybe Gleason—all scars and knuckles and crop cut—should’ve bowled right over the 23-year-old Johnson, who must’ve had his skates on when the club measured him at five-foot-nine. Or maybe Johnson just caught a break this time.
He’s due.
The only son of hockey coach dad Ken and a skating coach mom Debbie, Tyler Johnson was on skates at age 18 months. By age four, he was battling for pucks in a league reserved for kids aged six or older.
“I’m not sure quite how they got me in. My parents are influential in the hockey world back home,” he says of Liberty Lake, Wash., (population: 7,889). “It’s a smaller town, not many hockey players, but my mom taught basically everyone in and around my age how to skate.”
But it was the driving help, not the skating help that earns the Johnson family a spot in hockey parent lore.
“During the summer, I was travelling to Vancouver, B.C., every weekend. That’s seven hours from Spokane. My parents were driving me up there. That’s when I really started to play against top players, really had tougher competition,” Johnson recalls. “That was a big sacrifice for my parents both financially and emotionally having to do that every weekend. Without that, I don’t think I’d be where I am today.”
Even with those northbound treks, Johnson has little right to be here — a few weeks away from his first taste of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Not only was he never drafted into the NHL, he was cut from a USHL team, Cooper says. Heck, he was barely drafted into the Western Hockey League as a junior player. The Spokane Chiefs waited until the 11th round of the 2005 WHL Bantam Draft to take a flyer on the undersized local boy.
As a WHL rookie, Johnson scored 52 points, the Chiefs won the Ed Chynoweth Cup and a berth in the 2008 Memorial Cup. In 21 playoff games, Johnson scored five goals en route to a Memorial Cup championship and a WHL postseason MVP award. He was 17.
When the world juniors came around, observers said Johnson was too small, too young to make the under-20 national squad. He made the team, twice, and helped Team USA win gold in 2010.
Yet despite winning championships on every team he joined, despite scoring an eye-popping 115 points in 75 games for the Chiefs as a fourth-year junior and averaging a point per game in the playoffs, no NHL was willing to call his name on draft day.
“I never really focused too much on signing an NHL contract,” says Johnson, the same way a big man doesn’t focus too much on eating dinner. “I was just playing the game and having fun and hopefully my dream could come true.”
Sure, Johnson was on the radar. How could a WHL playoff MVP, goal-scoring champ, most sportsmanlike player of the year and first-team all-star not get a second look? When western juniors were polled, Johnson was voted the top face-off man, the best skater, the top defensive forward and the guy with the most accurate shot. The only measurement by which he came up short was his actual measurement. Johnson went to Phoenix’s training camp in 2008; Minnesota had him skate with the big guns in the autumn of 2009 and 2010. The organizations all said complimentary things to his face, but none of them pulled out a piece of legal paper and a pen.
“Probably my size,” Johnson says. “It’s always been a thing.”
Big guys must play themselves off teams; little guys always must play themselves on.
“That’s just sports,” Cooper says. “There’s a reason there’s not a ton of small guys in the league, because they’re not given a shot. They’re the guys that aren’t taken in the first round.”
A significant portion of professional coaches and management teams won’t take a chance on the small guy, no matter the height of his potential. Size doesn’t matter to the Lightning – a club long led by five-foot-eight Martin St. Louis and the NHL gateway for five-foot-eight Cory Conacher.
“Lucky for me, Tampa’s one of those organizations. They don’t care what you look like, your size or anything. It’s just how you play on the ice,” Johnson says. “One of the main reasons I signed in Tampa was the fact that Marty was here, and he’s done so much, I felt they would give me the opportunity. That’s the biggest thing—just getting that opportunity, that look for someone to believe in you, just for a second.”
Johnson never got to say goodbye to St. Louis before the former captain hopped a plane bound for New York at the NHL deadline, but both he and Cooper say having the similarly minded St. Louis – neither will take no for an answer – as a linemate did wonders for the rookie’s development.
“It’s a little different not having him around since he was a key part of our team, but it’s hockey. Sometimes you lose players, lose guys in your family. But we got [Ryan] Callahan and Stammer [Steven Stamkos] back, so that’s made the transition easier. That leadership coming in has helped,” Johnson says. “[Callahan] is that energy guy that just does it all. As a young guy, you watch him play, and it’s outstanding. You try to mimic what he does.”
Johnson’s transition to the big leagues has been eased by supportive veterans and by playing alongside fellow youngsters, like 2011 seventh-rounder Ondrej Palat; the Lightning have dressed as many as 11 rookies on some nights. But perhaps the biggest influence of all was playing under Cooper, with whom he won the 2012 Calder Cup, when both were part of the AHL champion Syracuse Crunch.
“In junior I thought I played a good defensive role, but going to the AHL is a huge step. And defence is the difference-maker. You have to relearn,” Johnson says. “It took me longer than I would’ve liked, but he was patient and slow with me and helped me out a lot.”
And so you have a young coach complimenting a young player. A should-be Calder candidate giving credit to a should-be Jack Adams candidate, and vice versa.
While Rookie of the Year honours are MacKinnon’s to lose, Johnson ranks among the top four in NHL rookie goals, assists, points, plus/minus and game winners. Better, he kills penalties and leads all freshmen with four shorthanded goals.
But he’d rather talk about his height than his individual stats.
“When you go into a season, I don’t think you should ever think about points, goals or assists. When I began, at first I just wanted to make the team, and then contribute as much as possible, any way that was, whether that was through points, PK, blocking shots, energy. This has been a great season for me, but there’s no way I could’ve done that without playing with great players,” he says. “Team success breeds individual success.”
The reverse is also true.