After another game-winner, legend of Tkachuk grows
The legend of Matthew Tkachuk might have been born seven years ago, when playing major-junior hockey for the London Knights, he barrelled down the left-wing, deftly dragged the puck past a defender and fired a shot that won the game — and the Memorial Cup.
The legend grew in his early NHL days with the Calgary Flames, including with an overtime buzzer-beater against Nashville in 2019 in which he shot the puck with his stick between his legs.
“I don’t know what to make of what we’ve just witnessed,” Kelly Hrudey said on the broadcast. “That is absolutely nuts.”
It leapt forward last year with a 104-point season for the Flames and another between-the-legs goal in a career that now has an absurd number of them.
But the Tkachuk legend has grown to thin-air heights in these Stanley Cup playoffs, after the 25-year-old American scored yet another gamewinner on Wednesday night, this time nothing fancy but just a snapshot from the slot as regulation time was about to expire to give his Florida Panthers a four-game sweep over the Carolina Hurricanes.
“Who else, right?,” Panthers teammate Aaron Ekblad said after the goal. “Who else?”
The man has a point. It was Tkachuk’s third game-winning goal against the Hurricanes, including the merciful one in Game 1 that prevented a fifth overtime. It was his fourth of this post-season. He has also assisted on four more game-winners.
Those eight involvements are two short of an NHL record for a single post-season held by Brad Richards and some fella named Gretzky. Tkachuk, having just advanced to the Stanley Cup final, has at least four games left to catch them.
Florida head coach Paul Maurice, who has also coached in Carolina, Winnipeg and Toronto, said Tkachuk is only doing now on the big stage of the late-round playoffs what he has been doing for a while, including against Maurice-coached teams.
“That bastard would score the same way,” he said, according to The Athletic. “Two minutes left on the clock after agitating the entire bench. He is a gifted, gifted man.”
The Tkachuk breakout is at once sudden and also feels like it has been coming for a while. His father, Keith, scored 511 goals in a long NHL career that began with the original Winnipeg Jets and finished in St. Louis, where Matthew was born (Keith met Matthew’s mother, Chantal, in Winnipeg).
But where Keith was a bruising power forward of the type that sends Don Cherry’s heart aflutter, Matthew came through the junior ranks displaying the kind of natural skill developed by a childhood spent in hockey rinks, complemented by his father’s antagonistic streak.
Tkachuk played in London on a line with Mitch Marner and on the United States national development team on a line with Auston Matthews, and was drafted sixth overall by the Flames in 2016. NHL stardom didn’t come immediately, but he was good enough to stick with the Flames at just 19 years old and had 77 points in 80 games at 21.
That early start, though, meant that he approached potential free agency before he had even hit the prime of his career. After his linemate Johnny Gaudreau left Calgary for Columbus last summer — the first NHL star to ever claim his heart was in the Ohio capital — Tkachuk told the Flames that he would not sign a long-term extension in Calgary (Keith had similarly tried to force his way out of Winnipeg, losing the captaincy in the process, before the whole franchise solved that problem for him by relocating to Phoenix).
The Flames moved him in a blockbuster deal for three players and a first-round draft pick in what seemed like a sparkling haul in last July, but has lost some of its sheen as Tkachuk went on to an Mvptype season and now a Connsmythe-type of playoff run.
He has already surpassed anything his dad did in an NHL post-season. Keith isn’t in the Hockey Hall of Fame despite more than 500 goals and 1,000 points, although his candidacy may have to be considered in light of genes. His younger son, Brady, plays for the Ottawa Senators.
Perhaps most impressively, he has gone on this run while still being the same type of player that he was back in junior. Teammates call him fun-loving, joyful, passionate. Opponents call him annoying, a prick and a pain in the ass. Sometimes teammates call him that, too.
He has the kind of relentless game that has always felt ideally suited for a Stanley Cup run, except for the part where he skates and stickhandles with his mouthguard dangling from between his teeth during play. Don’t do that, kids. That’s not how the mouthguard works. (In perhaps related news, it is not hard to find photos of Keith Tkachuk with several teeth missing.)