When your team’s fans have been waiting 28 seasons (a.k.a. “forever”) to celebrate a first championship, there are two things they don’t want to hear about from the folks running the franchise: Excuses. Or patience.
That is why the Florida Panthers made a coaching change last month despite the best regular season in club history. And why a new star, Matthew Tkachuk, was introduced Monday at the Cats’ hockey arena in Sunrise.
Florida spent big because you get what you pay for, if you’re lucky. And the Panthers just got a guy who scored more goals last season (42), for Calgary, than any player has for the Panthers since Pavel Bure in 2001. Panthers general manager Bill Zito calls him “a generational player,” and, at age 24 and signed long-term, he could be just that in South Florida.
NBA teams are swooning over an available Kevin Durant, who is almost 34. Tkachuk is a rarity: An available, budding superstar who is just coming into the heart of his prime.
Zito ain’t playin’ around here. That we now know. The Panthers’ GM not quite two years, Zito looks like he’d be cast as a retired MMA fighter in a film. Somebody you don’t mess with. And in hockey he’s ready to mix it up, take big swings. You want something? You go get it. You take it.
“It all happened within a day,” Tkachuk had said over the weekend, hours after the blockbuster trade with Calgary was announced. “At the end of the day Florida pushed like hell.”
Zito was doing the pushing.
He’d been called by Tkachuk’s agent on Wednesday. The player had made it known he would not re-sign long-term with the Flames.
“I got a call and raced out to Calgary right away. At first I didn’t think it was true,” Zito said Monday. “When you have a chance to add a player like Matthew to the organization, the price is steep.”
For Tkachuk and a fourth-round future draft pick the Panthers gave up longtime star Jonathan Huberdeau, valued defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, a prospect and 2025 first round pick
It was a great trade for Florida, partly because Tkachuk is 24 and now locked up eight more years while Huberdeau is five years older and only signed through next season.
Change had to happen. Not tinker ‘n tweak change. Big change.
Because perhaps not in the history of sports had a greater regular season flamed out more pitifully in the playoffs.
It was like ending a five-star Michelin meal with a stale donut for dessert.
Florida won the NHL’s Presidents’ Trophy for the best season record, led all of hockey in goals scored, then won a first-round playoff series for the first time since the halcyon, rat-flying days 1996.
And then fell through a giant hole in the ice, swept in the second round — swept, meekly scoring three goals in four games — by nemesis Tampa Bay. Unfathomably, The Panthers were 1-for-31 in postseason power play opportunities.
Unprecedented excitement and electricity to a sudden blackout.
A plain embarrassment, the way it ended. And Huberdeau, who’d set a club record with a 115-point season, all but disappeared. Had no goals and two assists in the sweep by Tampa.
The way it ended first cost Andrew Brunette his job. No way the interim coach tag comes off after an impotent sweep like that. I am still not sure Paul Maurice was the right guy to replace him. All-time leader in NHL coaching losses whose postseason track record is uninspiring. But I like the idea of a change at the top, the thinking in it.
The Tkachuk trade, I love.
It’s more than the goals. It’s the attitude. (The bloodlines aren’t bad either. Father Keith is a U.S. Hockey Hall of Famer).
We saw in the postseason ouster by Tampa Bay the difference between a Lightning team that played with bravado and a Cats squad that wasn’t sure how to.
Tkachuk saw that, too.
“I carry myself with swagger,” he said. “It’s kind of like how I live my life off the ice, too. I have a good confidence that’s not cocky. I think I’ll help, because the team at the other end of the state has that. Tampa’s the team to beat right now. For us we’re gonna have to go through them. It’s up to me to provide that, to help with that.”
Tkachuk noted, rightly, that, Aleksander Barkov’s persona is not swaggery.
‘Sasha is one of the best captains in the league; he leads by example,” said Tkachuk. “I’m almost like the other way. I’m not quiet. It’ll be beneficial for both of us to have each other.”
As for the burden of replacing, in Huberdeau, probably the Panthers’ all-time greatest player?
“I don’t feel it,” he said. “I’m a different type of player. I bring different things. Personal stuff, throw it out the door. I’m here to win. I’m here to be the last team standing.”
Tkachuk readies for a lifestyle change from a Canadian outpost known for sled dogs to the suburb of a metro area known for sunshine and nightlife. Is he ready? He smiled.
“Look what’s on my feet right now,” he said. “Flip flops.”
