Barnett making impact this season

BY GREGG DRINNAN
gdrinnan.blogspot.com

J.T. Barnett is anything but what used to be your typical WHL player.
You know the type. Raised on a farm north of Regina, or west of Winnipeg. Spent summers tossing around hay bales. Pipes as large as the rear axle on Grandpa’s farm truck, the same truck the kid started driving at the age of
12.
No, that’s not J.T. Barnett, who went into weekend action with six goals in five games for his Vancouver Giants. He represents what is becoming more and more the norm in the WHL.
Barnett, 17, was born in Calabasas, Calif., near Los Angeles, and moved to Phoenix when he was “10 or 11.” He is the son of Mike Barnett, who skated into hockey’s spotlight as Wayne Gretzky’s agent, later worked as general manager of the Phoenix Coyotes and now is senior advisor to the president and general manager and director of U.S. amateur scouting with the New York Rangers.
Give a listen as J.T. — by the way, that’s Justin Terrance — describes his minor hockey career . . .
“I started in Los Angeles,” he said before his Giants dropped a 2-1 shootout decision to the Blazers in Kamloops on Friday night. “Lived in Los Angeles and played for the Los Angeles Selects. Moved to Lake Arrowhead and played for the Lake Arrowhead Rangers. Down to Palm Springs. They didn’t really have a team there so I’d have to drive to Los Angeles to play there.
“After that, I moved to Phoenix and played for the junior Coyotes and then the PF Chang’s hockey team.”
PF Chang’s is a Chinese restaurant that sponsors two midget AAA teams —U16 and U18.
As Barnett said, those teams eat well.
“Everytime we’d get to go we’d go eat out,” he said, with a grin. “That was fun.”
(While Barnett was playing in Phoenix, his brother, Jesse, was playing junior B with the Summerland, B.C., Sting of the Kootenay International junior league. Jesse now is in law school.)
While J.T. was playing for PF Chang’s, he was selected by the Giants in the 2007 WHL bantam draft. It’s not like he was a first-rounder; no, he was taken in the 10th round.
Barnett attended the Giants’ camp prior to the 2008-09 season, signed a WHL contract and spent the season there. As a 16-year-old, he scored one goal in
38 games. Still, when the season ended his confidence hadn’t been damaged.
“I thought one of the main focuses was quickness and trying to get shots off quicker,” he said, when asked how he approached his offseason training.
He also wanted to “try to get a little big bigger.” The Giants list him rather generously at 6-foot-1 and 191 pounds.
He also wanted to “work on a couple of things like speed and edge control.”
Most importantly, he said, he “wanted to make sure I had a good summer so I would come back and have a good season.”
As the Giants broke training camp and veteran forwards Evander Kane (Atlanta Thrashers) and James Wright (Tampa Bay Lightning) were nowhere in sight, Barnett found himself on the Giants’ big line with captain Lance Bouma and Craig Cunningham.
And the guy who scored one goal in 38 games last season has been scoring with some kind of regularity.
“Every night it’s chance after chance,” Barnett said. “I’m going to the net and they bring the puck to the net every shift. I’m getting rewarded.”
There also has been talk of Barnett finding renewed confidence after getting into the first scraps of his WHL career.
There was one in the exhibition season, against Shayne Neigum, 19, of the Chilliwack Bruins, and another in the season-opener. The latter bout came in a 6-5 overtime victory over the Rockets in Kelowna. It was a game that was televised across the west on Shaw Cable. And there was Barnett scoring two power-play goals and duking it out — or trying to — with Kelowna forward Lucas Bloodoff, 20, who had 96 penalty minutes last season. Barnett piled up three minor penalties last season.
“After the first one, you get confident,” Barnett said of the pugilistic part of his game. “You can’t get hurt and it is fun. I know it was a big confidence boost after the preseason game. Then we went into Kelowna and it was a big game.”
He paused as he recalled the clash with Bloodoff.
“That wasn’t as good,” Barnett said with a laugh, a cut on the bridge of his nose and a fading mouse under his right eye evidence of that.
But there he was fighting again earlier this week during a 5-1 victory over the visiting Lethbridge Hurricanes. This time he went with Lethbridge defenceman Derek Ryckman, a 6-foot-3, 190-pound sophomore. It occurred during a second-period line brawl so the fighting major was accompanied with a game misconduct.
Which brought to an end Barnett’s five-game goal-scoring streak.
The Giants, meanwhile, just keep on rolling under head coach Don Hay. This was going to be a rebuilding, or at the very least a reloading, season. But there they are at the top of the B.C. Division and the Western Conference.
Yes, it’s early, but . . .
“Obviously we lost a lot of players,” Barnett said. “But we picked up some guys like (defencemen Kevin Connauton and David Musil). Guys are filling roles, other guys step up.
“Every season with Don coaching is going to be a competiitive season. We’re just going to build off what we have going right now.”