Island hockey fans will get to see a lot of Cody Glass next month when sa国际传媒 holds its training camp and plays four exhibition games in Greater Victoria before departing to Vancouver to headline Group A in the 2019 IIHF world junior championship.
The Victoria Royals will get to see Glass up close and personal tonight at the Moda Center and Saturday at Veterans Memorial Coliseum when they face the Portland Winterhawks in a Western Hockey League road set.
The 19-year-old centre was the sixth overall selection in the 2017 NHL draft but was returned to junior hockey by the Las Vegas Golden Knights. Glass has taken it out on WHL rivals with five goals and 18 assists for 23 points in 12 games for a nearly two-point-per-game average.
鈥淲e鈥檙e obviously a little bit more aware when we are facing a player like that on the ice,鈥� said Royals forward Kaid Oliver.
鈥淪pecial players can do special things.鈥�
They sure can, as attested by Glass鈥檚 94 points in 2016-17 for the Winterhawks followed by his 102 points last season.
The Royals have a template to follow, said Oliver. That is to do to Glass what Victoria did to regular-season 61-goal sniper Ty Ronning of the Vancouver Giants last spring in the first round of the playoffs. Ronning, now a pro with the Hartford Wolf Pack of the American Hockey League, was held to a goal by the Royals in the seven-game series, although he did get six assists.
鈥淧layers like [Glass] are sneaky and you have to be aware of them. I think how we played Ty Ronning in the playoffs is a good example [of how to contain],鈥� said Oliver.
Glass overcame the disappointment of being returned to junior. That is because of his attitude, according to Winterhawks assistant coach Don Hay.
鈥淐ody is an elite player who has impressed me with his work ethic,鈥� said Hay, the former Memorial Cup-winning head coach of the Giants and Kamloops Blazers.
鈥淗e is working on some of his weaknesses and areas that Las Vegas thinks he needs to work on. He is viewing the world juniors in Victoria and Vancouver as a good challenge for himself.鈥�
Oliver isn鈥檛 quite in that class but the two-way Victoria forward has four more goals than Glass after 12 games with nine in a breakout season. Oliver had eight goals combined in his previous two full seasons in Victoria. An even better projection of his progress is that he was minus-18 in 2016-17, minus-two last season and is plus-five this season.
Oliver credits his linemates Igor Martynov and D-Jay Jerome as 鈥渃licking鈥� with him. And he also noted he created chances last season but did not finish, so that is something he worked on over the summer.
鈥淚 felt I had a lot of opportunities around the crease last season. I wanted to make sure this season to put away [score on] those chances,鈥� said Oliver.
He is one of the reasons Victoria is a surprising 9-3, and ranked No. 7 in the CHL national top-10 poll, after suffering heavy graduation losses after last season.
鈥淰ictoria lost a lot of firepower from last year but appears to have not missed a beat,鈥� said Hay, who guided sa国际传媒 Division-rival Kamloops last season.
鈥淚t鈥檚 always a group effort with the Royals. They place a lot of value in group play. And they get great goaltending from Griffen Outhouse.鈥�
Portland, meanwhile, looked to have hit its stride but dropped its last three games to fall to 7-6-1.
On the injury front, 20-year-old Victoria forward Dante Hannoun is still out one-to-two more weeks with an upper-body issue while forwards Phillip Schultz, who will represent Denmark at the world juniors, and Logan Doust are day-to-day.
ICE CHIPS: Forwards Tyler Soy and Tanner Kaspick, part of that 2017-18 Royals graduation class, have reunited in the ECHL with the Tulsa Oilers. Soy was assigned to Tulsa this week by the Anaheim Ducks and Kaspick by the St. Louis Blues. . . . Joe Hicketts, two-time defenceman for sa国际传媒 at the world juniors and the only Royals alumnus to play in the NHL, was returned to Grand Rapids of the AHL after eight games in Detroit in which he averaged 17:06 minutes per game and had a second-best 15 hits among Red Wings blue-liners while recording no points and going minus-6.
