Hurricanes killer Matthew Tkachuk is ‘back' — but is this a different Tkachuk?

New York Times

20-05-2025

RALEIGH, N.C. — It all started here at Lenovo Center two years ago with Matthew Tkachuk's heroics in Game 1 of a Florida Panthers sweep of the Carolina Hurricanes.
It was a night that set the tone for this tremendous run by the Florida Panthers — for two straight Stanley Cup Final appearances, the first championship in team history a year ago and now a third straight Eastern Conference final, opening Tuesday night.
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Thirteen seconds before what would have been the fifth overtime in a contest that started on May 18 and had carried into the early hours of May 19, Tkachuk ended the sixth-longest game in NHL history with a quadruple-overtime winner, then headed right for the corner exit leading to the visitors locker room of what was then called PNC Arena, motioning to his exhausted teammates to follow him off.
'I remember being really tired after the first one, and just the way I scored and looked, the first thing I saw was, like, the door,' Tkachuk said Monday, a day after he and the Panthers ended the season of the Toronto Maple Leafs. 'So, I left.'
FOUR OVERTIMES
ONLY ONE MATTHEW TKACHUK pic.twitter.com/fY9XfKdqdn
— x – Florida Panthers (@FlaPanthers) May 19, 2023
So naturally, in Game 2 of that 2023 series, when Tkachuk ended things less than two minutes into the first overtime, the Panthers' resident shift disturber thought it would be funny to stick to the theme — opening the exit door and going right to the locker room in lieu of an all-out pile-up celebration on the ice.
'Bus in 10 (minutes),' Tkachuk famously called it at the time.
In other words, let's get out of Dodge and back to Fort Lauderdale.
'Just the way I was going, the door was right there,' Tkachuk recalled Monday. 'So it was, 'Let's just get out of here.' I remember we kind of stole that game, too, a little bit. We played well, but, yeah, that was just, like, 'Let's get out of here fast.''
TKACHUK DOES IT AGAIN‼️
HE SCORES HIS SECOND STRAIGHT OT WINNER FOR FLORIDA! #StanleyCup pic.twitter.com/OYHt0C0v60
— NHL (@NHL) May 21, 2023
Tkachuk wasn't done with the Hurricanes. In Game 3, he had the primary assist on Sam Reinhart's power-play winner in a 1-0 win. And in Game 4, he scored twice, including a tiebreaking buzzer-beater with 4.9 seconds left in the third period.
Of all players, it had to be Tkachuk who put the final shiv in the Canes' back.
TKACHUK BURIES THE GO-AHEAD GOAL WITH 4 SECONDS LEFT!! 😻🙌 pic.twitter.com/w9ePLmLAdx
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 25, 2023
Yes, the Panthers ended up losing to the Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup Final that year, but it was a step along the path to becoming champs a year later. And much to the dismay of Hurricanes fans, Tkachuk said Monday that in his view, not much has changed since the last time they saw him in the playoffs.
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'There's really not much different with us,' he said. 'Like, we're still goofing around, having fun, joking all the time. But when it's time to put those work boots on, I mean, I don't think there's a team that works harder.
'That's what makes it so much fun and so much more rewarding, is the grind of the season. We talk about it a lot. You know, start from training camp and building our game, and that playoff experience started three years ago, and this building was a part of that.'
Not that Tkachuk, 27, expects anything to come easy here — not against this battle-tested, refined Hurricanes team.
'I don't think anybody really enjoys playing Carolina,' Tkachuk said, laughing. 'Very tough team to play against, and they make it hard on you every game. There were good memories here in this building a couple years ago, and that whole series for us. But it's all back to zeros now. It's a new year, new series.
'I mean, I personally thought Carolina was going to beat the Rangers last year. So when you look at it, it could have been three years in a row of us playing against each other in the conference final. So I think that just speaks to how not only talented our two teams are, but how we're built for playoffs. And they are as well. They're a great team, and it's going to make for another great showdown.'
Tkachuk knows the history the Hurricanes have even beyond these past three years, a team he's seen knocking on the door of winning the East 'for almost 10 years now' — well before he arrived in South Florida, traded to the Panthers from the Calgary Flames in the Jonathan Huberdeau-MacKenzie Weegar blockbuster in 2022.
'It feels like a long time,' he said. 'They've had a great run. And it's no surprise that we're facing them.'
It hasn't been an easy road for Tkachuk to make it back, personally, though. Almost three months ago, after the United States lost to Canada in overtime in the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game, he could barely walk out of TD Garden. He wouldn't play another game until Game 1 of the playoffs after undergoing surgery for a lower-body injury.
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Then, in that series opener against the rival Tampa Bay Lightning, Tkachuk scored two goals and an assist in less than 12 minutes.
In 12 playoff games, he's tied for fifth on the Panthers with three goals and tied for sixth with 9 points.
Is he healthy?
'I honestly feel great,' Tkachuk insisted. 'I'm expecting to just continue to get better. The longer this goes, the better you feel. So hopefully we keep this going for a while.'
With Tkachuk, even if he isn't producing, he's effective. In the Toronto series, he had no goals and four assists in seven games but was defensively sound, got in the Maple Leafs' face, got in Joseph Woll's kitchen and made sure to let William Nylander know to keep his head up at the end of Game 5 when Max Domi decided to take a last-second, message-sending run at Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov.
Matthew Tkachuk exchanges words with the Toronto bench at the final buzzer 🍿 pic.twitter.com/4RQT6PVCxd
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 12, 2025
'He brings a lot to the table, even when he's not scoring or getting points,' Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad said. 'He's being physical. He's a bench presence. He's a little thorn in the other team's side. So we appreciate everything he does.'
It was clear that even though he wasn't producing at the level we've all grown to expect from Tkachuk in the Toronto series, his line with Sam Bennett and 'Mr. Clutch' Carter Verhaeghe was getting better and better.
In Game 4, according to Natural Stat Trick, Tkachuk's line was even in five-on-five numbers. Tkachuk did assist on Verhaeghe's game-winning power-play goal.
In a Game 5 rout in Toronto, Tkachuk's line was dominant, with a 16-3 advantage on attempts, a 9-1 edge on scoring chances, a 71 percent expected goal share and a 1-0 upper hand on goals, with Tkachuk assisting on Dmitry Kulikov's winner.
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In a Game 6 loss in Florida, Tkachuk's line had a 20-6 advantage on attempts, a 7-3 edge on scoring chances, a 3-1 upper hand on high-danger chances and a 75 percent expected goal share.
And in the Game 7 win, Tkachuk's line won the attempts battle at 23-13.
'I thought he was considerably behind it in the Tampa series,' Panthers coach Paul Maurice said Monday. 'I mean, I played him 12 minutes the first night, and a lot of that was power play. And then he just kind of built and built, and now it's back up close to (20 minutes per game), and I don't think about it.
'He's back. I know he's like 100 percent. Taking hits, giving hits. We don't talk about his minutes. So he's had a really big impact. I think it built through the Toronto series. I had (Verhaeghe-Bennett-Tkachuk) almost in the three-hole at the start, but that's because the (Anton) Lundell line (with leading scorers Brad Marchand and Eetu Luostarinen) was going so well. And then (Sunday) night, I ran those guys hard, because they were right.'
If Tkachuk is indeed 100 percent, the Hurricanes know better than anyone that he is always a threat for a big moment or three, whether that's in the first period, the waning seconds of the third period or, yes, deep into quadruple overtime.
'He does all the things right,' said Panthers defenseman Seth Jones, who'd known Tkachuk only as an opponent until coming over in a pre-deadline trade. 'He doesn't cheat the game. When he's not backchecking, he's physical. He's constantly in the other team's crease, causing havoc, drawing penalties, just being a pest out there. And I think that, along with the goal scoring, he's one of the best in the world at that.
'Off the ice, when I first got here, he was hurt. He was injured. And when he came back, you could feel the energy in the room. Whether it's pregame, on a practice day, anything like that, he's constantly talking. He's constantly keeping the room light and getting everyone going, making sure everyone feels good about themselves in their game and where they're at. On and off the ice, he's a big leader on this team.'
And Canes fans have seen, with Tkachuk at Lenovo Center, 'off the ice' can mean heading for the corner exit with a victory in hand.