This is Part 2 in a multi-part series on Port Moody's only NHL player, Kent Johnson.

For many athletes, particularly hockey players, family plays a big role in influencing them to pursue their sport of choice. Kent Johnson is no different. From being coached by his dad, Jay, to following in the footsteps of his older brother, Kyle, the Columbus Blue Jackets forward found lots of hockey influence early on in his pursuit of the sport.

“I feel like he just gets a lot of the credit for me and my success. I think, him being the older brother, you kind of get that advantage of competing against him and some of his friends,” Johnson said of what impact his older brother had on the early stages of his hockey career.

“Obviously he was just a great mentor [...] always wanted to help me succeed in any way possible. When I was 15 and 16 years old, we would train together, and he was obviously older, so I feel like he was smart and helped me do a good job with that stuff. He was awesome.”

Johnson’s influences aren’t limited to just his family members, however. The forward is part of a strong core of NHL players who have made the jump from the Tri-Cities to the NHL. The current group of Tri-Cities-based NHLers includes Pittsburgh Penguins rookie Ben Kindel (Coquitlam), New York Islanders centre Mat Barzal (Coquitlam), and fellow Blue Jacket Dante Fabbro (Coquitlam).

“I kind of hate saying it now, because I’m good buddies with him, to pump his tires — I always liked Barzal, watching him play, and [it’s] just cool being from the area,” Johnson joked.

As it stands, Johnson is currently the only player from Port Moody who has skated in NHL games this season. This doesn’t mean the NHL hasn’t seen its share of Port Moody-based players.

One player whose name is likely familiar to many Tri-City households is Ryan Johansen, a 13-year NHL veteran who, like Johnson, is also from Port Moody. The forward was drafted fourth-overall by the Blue Jackets in 2010 and went on to produce a fine list of NHL accolades including being named All-Star Game MVP in 2015. Being from Port Moody and being drafted in the top-five by Columbus are not the only things that connect Johnson and Johansen.

“Just being a Port Moody kid, and my brother played with Lucas Johansen, and my dad was good friends — and still is — with Randall [Johansen]. I think Ryan coming out of Port Moody really helped me believe that it was possible [to make the NHL].”

Another one of Johnson’s biggest influences, while also from Port Moody, actually didn’t start working with him until he left the Tri-Cities. In his lone season spent at the Burnaby Winter Club as a 14 and 15-year-old, Johnson played under Head Coach and fellow Port Moody product Maco Balkovec. In Johnson’s words, Balkovec was “an unreal coach.

“We’d go on the ice before practice every day and work on shooting a lot, because I used to have a pretty bad shot. And he was like, ‘you score a lot of goals from in-tight, but you’ve got to be able to score from farther too.’ So he really helped my shot. It was pretty cool to see the success after instead, of scoring goals from farther away. I feel like that was a big thing for me, because if I wasn’t able to do that and score from a bit farther, it would have been hard coming up at higher levels.”

“We really worked on placement on the blade, and then his hand position to help load it, and really getting him to apply pressure with his hand on the toe of the stick; with the modern sticks, how they really can use the width of the blade and the width of the shaft,” Balkovec explained regarding the process of working with Johnson. “He’s just like anyone who is a master of their craft — obsessive about it. As soon as he saw what that looked like, once he had done that, and he [was] just working on it every day, so it wasn’t too long that he was able to score from distance.”

Balkovec’s first experience with Johnson wasn’t actually as his Head Coach, but that of the opposition. Prior to the forward’s tenure at Burnaby Winter Club, the program’s PeeWee A2 team, coached by Balkovec, faced off against Johnson and Port Moody’s team during the Provincial Championships.

It’s yet another tie back to Johnson’s Port Moody roots.

“He was just sick,” Balkovec recounted watching Johnson as a kid. “He was so little. He was so tiny, but ridiculously skilled. [He] had the ability to get through and skate through everybody, but the majority of his goals he scored were literally just skating around the goalie and slipping it into the blue paint.”