A stick-tap to our friends at Nucks Misconduct who found this article about Tanner Glass:
He thought hard about taking the Vancouver offer, which was pretty much the same as the one offered by the Penguins, but was swayed by the Pens’ offer of a more versatile role and a chance to be on a Stanley Cup winner. Of course, sharing a locker room with Sidney Crosby doesn’t hurt, either.
"It was an extremely difficult decision," Glass told The Province shortly after his deal was announced. "I think the opportunity was a bit better in Pittsburgh. They said they’d move me up and down the lineup and I’d be killing penalties. They like my game. I know I’m going to get a chance to play."
First of all- ouch to the local Van paper point out Pittsburgh being a Cup contender over Vancouver -- don't they win the Presidents Trophy for the league's top (regular season) team almost every season? Would think they could contend too.
Secondly, interesting what the Pens told Glass. In Winnipeg Glass was a member of the highly popular "GST line" that showed a lot of energy, and spark as a shutdown crash-and-bang 3rd line. However, this is a guy with 13 goals in 262 career NHL games, he's not in the lineup for scoring, and we'd be very surprised to see him "move up" in the lineup too often.
He's right about killing penalties though: last year Glass played 1:47 short-handed per game with the
Jets, second most amongst forwards. With the
Jordan Staal trade, the Pens have a huge hole of minutes to fill there. Glass should slot in nicely with
Craig Adams,
Matt Cooke,
Pascal Dupuis and
Brandon Sutter to do most of the heavy lifting for forwards killing penalties.
Always interesting to see this time of year which players chose which teams for what reasons, and it's nice to see that Glass chose the Pens over the
Canucks when all things were about equal.