Panthers’ Tkachuk, Barkov have a blast in skills competition
Matthew Tkachuk really likes being a Panther and he wants to make sure everyone knows it.
The All-Star right wing has spent most of the last six months telling everyone about how much he likes his new life with the Panthers. At the NHL All-Star Skills Competition on Friday, he got a chance to show it.
As the final participant in the NHL Breakaway Challenge, Tkachuk made his routine all about South Florida. He placed
Brady Tkachuk in a beach chair and got Aleksander Barkov to dress up like a lifeguard. He draped a towel around his shoulders, placed a bucket hat on his had and strapped scuba goggles to his face. The All-Star right wing even got Christian Wilkins to go out on the ice with him, waving a pool noodle to fire up the friendly Sunrise crowd.
“A lot of people,” Tkachuk said, “are pretty jealous of where Barky and I get to play.”
On a night of gimmicks, Tkachuk didn’t deviate too much from the norm — his actual shot was mostly unspectacular, bouncing the puck on his stuck as he approached, catching it in his bucket hat and then shooting everything past Roberto Luongo, who was wielding a pool noodle instead of a stick — and it got him a second-place finish in an underwhelming Breakaway Challenge by delivering one of the few highlights of the day for FLA Live Arena.
“The goggles, I will say, I added last minute,” Tkachuk said. “I was flipping it, I immediately regretted it.”
The winner, instead, was the combination of All-Star forwards Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby,
who got the top score after Sergei Ovechkin, the Washington Capital’s 4-year-old son, scored and Max Kerman of the Arkells awarded Tkachuk a 2 of 10.
“That was a joke,” Barkov deadpanned, stone-faced. “We need to find the guy.”
The score wasn’t what mattered, though.
Tkachuk insists he hasn’t been bragging to other players around the league about how close he lives to the beach and what the weather is like in Florida. He said they don’t need a reminder.
really, came when 4-yearold Sergei Ovechkin joined his dad Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby for a three-onnone breakaway and got the puck past Luongo — a performance that got a perfect score of 40 from the judges (Adam DiMarco of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” professional tennis player Victoria Azarenka, and WWE superstars Montez Ford and Angelo Dawkins).
Luongo opened the event by stopping the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mitchell Marner, who dressed as James Crockett from Miami Vice and scored just a 21.
He ended the event with a beach-themed attempt from Panthers winger Matthew Tkachuk, who got assists from his brother Brady Tkachuk (lounging in a beach chair), Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov (in a lifeguard suit) and the Miami Dolphins’ Christian Wilkins, who gave
Luongo a pool noodle to replace his stick and a pair of sunglasses for the goaltender to wear under his mask.
The score? Surprisingly only a 33.
While this was Luongo’s first time in net at FLA Live Arena since April 6, 2019, it’s not the last time he’s been on the ice in a semi-competitive format. He has competed in a pair of alumni games over the
past four months — first in November as part of the Pro Hockey Hall of Fame festivities in November and then again on Wednesday as part of a Panthers-hosted alumni game at the IceDen in Coral Springs as part of the lead up to the All-Star Game.
Luongo, however, played forward in both of those games.
On Wednesday, he had
two assists and a goal in the final seconds, but the Panthers alumni team lost to a team of NHL alumni 15-11 that night.
“The pace in this one was a little too fast for me,” Luongo said. “I felt a little lost, but I do enjoy it. We’ll see. Maybe the next one I’ll go back in net.”