Matthew Tkachuk emerges from the front door of his parents’ home in St. Louis wearing a T-shirt and shorts, his bare feet hitting the blacktop driveway as he welcomes a visitor.
“You just caught me,” the Panthers superstar says. “I’m headed back to Florida next week.”
It’s late August, and there’s a matter-of-fact inflection in Tkachuk’s voice — no apprehension like there would have been the year before. He’s now a homeowner in the Sunshine State, and he’ll only need to do a little dusting once he gets back. He won’t be facing questions about forcing a sign-and-trade out of Calgary or whether he’s worth the eight-year, $76 million contract he received from the Panthers. And there will be no one wondering about his commitment level, not after playing in the Stanley Cup Final against Vegas with a broken sternum.
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The sling Tkachuk wore on his right shoulder to help heal the injury is gone, and now stepping onto the back deck of the family’s house, he puts those bare feet on a table and reflects on all that the past 12 months have brought.
It’s been a lot, from posting 40 goals and 109 points in the Panthers’ regular season, which led to the third-most votes for the Hart Trophy, to tying an NHL record for the most overtime-winning goals in playoff history.
There were also phone calls and text messages from Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr, and sharing the TNT stage with NBA greats Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley.
Yet somehow, through it all, the 25-year-old winger says he never felt the pressure — or the fact that if he failed, he’d be criticized for maneuvering the trade to the off-beat organization and opting for life on the beach.
“Weirdly, I didn’t,” he says. “I remember talking to my family when I went to Florida, and they were shocked that I didn’t feel it. They’re like, ‘We feel the pressure. You were part of this big trade, you signed this big contract, and now you’ve got to prove …’
“I was like, ‘I don’t look at it like that at all. I just want to go there and make the team better. It’s going to be tough, but I know what I bring is what this team needs.’ I felt completely confident that if I was myself, when push came to shove, we were going to be better off.”
Florida was better off, as was Tkachuk, who is fully recovered from the broken sternum and set to embark on Year 2 with the Panthers when they open the regular season Thursday in Minnesota.
But his life will be a little different. Last year this time, he was a star in the league, though sometimes a controversial one.
Now, he’s one of the faces of the sport.
Upon arriving in Florida after the trade, Tkachuk learned quickly that he wasn’t in Canada anymore. He went to a Florida Marlins game in Miami, which is less than an hour’s drive from where the Panthers play in Sunrise, and nobody recognized him. People he met around the city asked him what he did for a living.
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“I’d say ‘I play hockey,’ and they’d say, ‘There’s hockey down here?'” Tkachuk says. “It was an eye-opening experience, coming from Calgary. It was great, but you still want to have the pride of, ‘Yeah, I’m a hockey player,’ and wanting people to think that’s pretty cool.”
Tkachuk isn’t the first person to experience this. In fact, Panthers coach Paul Maurice can relate, having spent nine seasons on Winnipeg’s bench from 2013 to ’22.
“We are in a nontraditional market, so we need players that fans who maybe didn’t grow up with the game can identify with,” Maurice says. “To be a fan, you have to identify with something beyond the game, and that’s where the connection is made. Some of that outreach isn’t the marketing plan. … It’s having personalities here that cause excitement for fans and they want to turn on the TV or come to a hockey game. Then when you watch, Matthew has got a big smile on his face, and he loves living in Florida, and it’s genuine, so that’s the connection.”
If that connection between Tkachuk and the fan base wasn’t forged by his Hart-finalist regular season, it certainly was by the playoffs.
After sneaking their way into the postseason, the Panthers opened the postseason with a first-round series against the Boston Bruins, fresh off an NHL-record 135-point regular season. It looked like the Bruins would be moving on with ease when they won 6-2 in Game 4 to go up 3-1 in the series.
“Game 5 was a super-tough game to win, when you’re going back to Boston down 3-1, and you just got the s— beat out of you and now (Bruins captain Patrice) Bergeron is back,” Tkachuk says. “Basically, everything was against us.”
But in Game 5, Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky made 44 saves and Tkachuk scored 6:05 into overtime for a 4-3 win.
The series went back to Sunrise, where the Panthers won 7-5 in Game 6 before wrapping up the upset with a 4-3 OT victory in Game 7 in Boston.
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“Paul’s message was, ‘We can play 10, 15, 20 years all together here, and we will never have a harder playoff round than that,'” Tkachuk says. “It was a legacy series for the organization.”
Florida faced Toronto in the second round, and after Tkachuk posted 11 points against the Bruins, he added five more against the Maple Leafs. The Panthers won the series 4-1, and at that point, he had five goals and 16 points through 12 playoff games.
“We had so many key contributions, and once you get in the playoffs and you’re in the second round, the only pressure you feel is in the sense that you don’t want to waste this opportunity,” Tkachuk says.
“I wanted to be the guy that either won the game or lost it.”
That’s not arrogance, according to Maurice.
“It’s based on confidence because he’s had success,” Maurice says. “He wants to be that guy. He doesn’t process pressure as a weight. He’s one of those guys, it makes him better.
“Those guys put themselves in that position. They find a way to find the hole to demand the puck to make the play.”
It didn’t take long in the Eastern Conference final against Carolina to witness that again.
With just 13 seconds remaining in the fourth overtime of Game 1, Tkachuk scored his second OT goal of the postseason for a 3-2 win. And as he did after his OT goal in Game 5 against Boston, he got off the ice quickly.
WALK. OFF. 🤯
AFTER SCORING THE 4TH OT WINNER, TKACHUK POINTED TO THE LOCKER ROOM AND SKATED RIGHT OFF THE ICE pic.twitter.com/8GS5TdNzXw
— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) May 19, 2023
Tkachuk remembers thinking. “‘We’ve been out here for so long. Let’s get out of here.’ After that, guys were joking around, and I said, ‘If I score in OT on the road again, I’ll do it again.'”
Sure enough, in Game 2 against Carolina, Tkachuk scored 1:51 into OT, which gave him the sudden-death game-winner in back-to-back games and a league-record-tying third time in the playoffs. And on cue, he left the ice, telling his teammates, “Bus in 10 (minutes).”
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“I was right by the door (to go off the ice),” he says. “It all just kind of worked perfectly.
“During the whole playoff run, I really wasn’t paying attention to much that was going on outside. But people have come up to me and brought that up as one of their favorite parts of playoffs.”
Well, not all fans.
The Hurricanes’ faithful sure had their fill of Tkachuk, especially after he scored with five seconds left in regulation for a 4-3 win in Game 4, finishing off the Panthers’ third-round sweep.
But fan wrath is nothing new for Tkachuk.
“Sometimes it gets to be a little much with the hatred that I don’t necessarily understand,” Tkachuk says. “I know in Calgary, fans hated (Edmonton Oilers star Connor) McDavid because he was always winning games for them. So I think that’s more of a compliment.”
Maybe Tkachuk wasn’t McDavid, but last season’s run did move him firmly into superstar status.
On May 27, the Miami Heat were hosting the Boston Celtics for Game 6 of the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals, and the face of hockey in Florida was invited onto the TNT set.
Tkachuk left the game but later returned. He even scored the game-tying goal late in regulation, which allowed the Panthers to pull out the win on a goal by Verhaeghe.
Tkachuk’s availability for the remainder of the series, however, was in jeopardy after being diagnosed with a broken sternum.
“That’s playoff hockey,” he says. “I kind of knew once it happened that I probably didn’t have much hockey left in me.”
Maurice consulted with team doctors before making the call on whether Tkachuk could play in Game 4.
“In most other situations, I wouldn’t have played him,” Maurice says. “Certain players get to a point that they earn a right to make that call. With what he had given to that point, he had earned the right to be in that game.
“The doctors said, ‘It is what it is. He’s not going to make it worse. It’s just going to be as painful as hell.’ I wrestled with, almost, the morality of it, but he was cleared if he could tolerate it, and he wanted that chance. He was very clear he was playing that game, and I had faith in his ability to find a way.”
Tkachuk’s younger brother, Brady, was staying with him in Florida and helped get him out of bed the morning of Game 4. His family gave him a ride to the rink. He had the Panthers’ equipment manager, Teddy Richards, tie his skates, and other members of the staff put on his gear.
“You just don’t want to be a disservice to your team,” Tkachuk says. “Everybody plays through that stuff in the playoffs — maybe not that exact injury, but everybody plays through stuff. It was a grind, though. I couldn’t get in a stick battle or pass the puck. I was basically a rover, just killing time for the rest of the guys to rest.
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“I could hold my head high, playing in that game and trying to do everything I could to help get the boys a win. But yeah, it sucked.”
Following Florida’s 3-2 loss in Game 4, there wasn’t really a decision to make about Tkachuk playing in Game 5. After posting 24 points (11 goals, 13 points) in 20 playoff games, he was done.
“We both sat down, and Matthew just said, ‘I just can’t do it,'” Maurice says. “It was incredibly impressive to witness.”
The Panthers were done, too. They fell 9-3 in Game 5.
Tkachuk didn’t need surgery but wore a sling for about a month to limit contact and any potential pain. It was especially helpful with the “bro hugs” he received when he attended Brady’s bachelor party, followed by the weddings of his brother as well as fellow NHLers Luke Kunin, Charlie McAvoy and Kevin Hayes.
“The tequila was kicking in, so I think the booze was making me feel a little better, too,” he says.
But while there was some pleasure this offseason, there was also a lot of work to get healthy for the season. Tkachuk had physical therapy every morning followed by an hour-long walk or a 30-minute Peloton ride. He’d finish in the pool, where he started out just crossing his arms in the water and gradually got to a point where he was treading water for 20- and 30-minute sessions.
“With the fracture, you’re re-strengthening the joints and stuff around it, which takes time,” he says.
A CT scan in early August confirmed Tkachuk was fully healed. He then started skating without pucks but was stick-handling by the second week of the month and ripping shots by the end of it.
“Recovery was great,” he says. “A lot of work into it, but I’m very happy with how it went.”
Maurice marvels at Tkachuk, how he was able to come into Florida and command respect and become such an influence in such a short time.
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“He’s an interesting, interesting man,” Maurice says. “He has this very sophisticated understanding of people’s personalities around him, that’s beyond his age. When you have conversations with him, whether it’s about leadership or what the team needs, he can flip right into a very sophisticated discussion that’s highly unusual. But then he’ll tell a joke like a young man.
“We have really strong leadership in our room, including (captain Aleksander) Barkov. … But Matthew came in, and I don’t know how he did it — whether it’s innate or just how he processes it — but he brought leadership in a very important way and didn’t have to displace anybody to do it. He didn’t steal anybody’s thunder. He added to it.”
That’s not to mention the fit Tkachuk has been with the fans.
“What Matthew was able to do was come to this town and make a connection,” Maurice says. “You don’t go watch Tkachuk play and talk about how much money he makes. You go to watch him play, and it’s awesome what he does on the ice.”
It’s a quality that makes someone a star. And perhaps now, a superstar.
“Yeah, but I still don’t look at myself like that,” Tkachuk says. “I guess it’s cool to be known as that, but I wouldn’t talk about myself in that sense. The style I play, it might not be as successful (in today’s NHL) as maybe my brother and I have shown the last few years. But I think it’s good to show people that the way we play is still a big part of the league. You have all these guys that are insanely skilled, and that’s great, but the way we play can still be successful.
“I’m gaining traction, and in Florida, it’s been amazing. I trusted everything that was being built and trusted that what I wanted was going to work out. My excitement level is the highest it’s ever been. I had so much fun this past year that I want to do it again and just change the ending this time. Now all I’ve got to do is win a championship, so I guess the race is on for that.”
(Top photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)