Matthew Tkachuk was ‘frustrated,’ but never lost faith in ‘really fun’ Year 1 for Panthers
His father said Matthew Tkachuk was “devastated.” His team was facing a moment capable of “defining us for the next five years,” his coach said. The Florida Panthers, less than a year removed from winning the Presidents’ Trophy, were in a bleak place back in the winter, in danger of missing the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Even amid the frustration Keith Tkachuk described, Matthew said he was “always confident.” Even once it was clear the Panthers would come nowhere close to matching their 122-point total from the 2021-22 NHL season, Tkachuk honed in on other, more important goals.
“Everybody says they want to win the Stanley Cup. You’ve got to make the playoffs,” said Tkachuk, who finished his first regular season in South Florida with 109 points. “That’s always been my goal: make the playoffs every year.”
It was the “bare minimum goal” for the Panthers this year, coach Paul Maurice said, and yet it’s something they needed to achieve and almost didn’t.
In the last two years, Florida has traded away four future first-round picks to load up for immediate contention. One of those picks, plus star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau and star defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, was sent to the Flames in the offseason to get Tkachuk and he gave the Panthers a historic season — one they came to close to wasting altogether. After following up a Presidents’ Trophy-winning season with a blockbuster trade and a coaching change, missing out on the Stanley Cup playoffs would have been a catastrophic result for Florida.
Instead, the Panthers rallied from nine points back after Christmas and shrugged off an ill-timed, season-worst four-game losing streak in March to grab the second and final wild card in the East. It means Florida is now tied for the sixth longest postseason streak in the NHL, Tkachuk has an outside shot to be a Hart Memorial Trophy finalist and these Panthers, no matter how long the odds are, have some slim chance at winning the Stanley Cup.
They’ll face their hardest test first, too: Florida opens up the Cup playoffs Monday at 7:30 p.m. against the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Boston Bruins at TD Garden in Massachusetts.
“You’ve just got to give yourself a chance,” Tkachuk said. “We’ve done that for ourselves.”
Even if the odds of springing a first-round upset aren’t great, they’re still existent. In 2012, the Kings won the Cup as the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference and No. 1 seeds have gone down 19 times in Round 1 in NHL history, with Presidents’ Trophy winners losing seven times in the first round since the trophy was first awarded in 1986. There’s value in just making the playoffs every year — both financially and culturally, and in the quest for championships — and Tkachuk, whose father played 89 playoff games in his 18-year career, knows well.
Now, Florida is one of only eight teams to make the playoffs in each of the last four years — the Panthers made the qualifying round of the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs, which were expanded because of COVID-19 — and a recently inexperienced group is now about as battle-tested as anyone around the league.
“It’s all about consistency,” president Matt Caldwell said Thursday. “You’ve got to show the fans hope and you’ve got to show them that you’re going to be consistent. Especially in hockey, you never know when you’re going to make your run. There’s so much that can happen in the playoffs. You see all the great teams like Tampa and Colorado, they’re in it every year and then they break through, so that’s our plan is to hopefully make the playoffs every year.”
Since the start of March, the Panthers have the fourth best record in the East and lead the conference with 3.8 goals per game. Their longest winning streak of the season came in the last month and they got to the playoffs despite Barkov, center Sam Bennett, star defenseman Aaron Ekblad, and goaltenders Spencer Knight and Sergei Bobrovsky all missing at least 11 games. Although Bennett will at least miss his 13th straight game with a soft-tissue injury in Game 1 and Knight is away from the team in the NHL’s player assistance program, Florida still has the bones of a Presidents’ Trophy-winning roster with a style of play it believes is better suited to the playoffs.
Tkachuk can at least admit he was “frustrated” at points in the winter. It was never, he insists, because of any regrets about leaving Calgary for Sunrise, though, or a feeling he was wrong about what the Panthers were building. He saw those bones — with Barkov’s two-way excellence, Ekblad’s moments of brilliance despite his injuries, Bobrovsky’s ability to get red hot and even defenseman Brandon Montour blossoming into an out-of-nowhere contender for the James Norris Memorial Trophy — and knew there was still the potential to be great.
“We just had to find it and put it all together,” Tkachuk said. “We have the last month or so—the second half of the year, to be honest. It’s been really fun.”
No matter how long this run goes and even if it doesn’t get to Round 2 like it did last year, this season was still another important step for Florida. Four straight years in the postseason is a franchise record and the Panthers have now done it with three different coaches, two different general managers and only two players left from Year 1 of the streak.
Florida took a step back this year — and certainly a bigger one than the organization expected — but the Panthers knew they would, with $6.6 million tied up in dead cap space and a stylistic overhaul with a new, defensive-minded coach. Even the Tkachuk trade was made more with an eye toward the next decade than 2023, with Florida giving up two stars, including one of its few established defenseman, for one.
Still, the Panthers didn’t exactly celebrate when they clinched their spot in the playoffs Tuesday. General manager Bill Zito described it as “relief” because “this was our expectation.”
“Yes, there’s a lot of obstacles we’ve had to overcome and I’m thrilled that we have, but this is an opportunity. This is a beginning,” the GM said. “There’s definitely a feeling of, Why not us? We’re in. That’s all it takes.”
