‘It’s going to be stressful for our parents.’ Matthew and Brady Tkachuk begin their Atlantic Division rivalry
Has an NHL rivalry between two players ever started literally one second after a trade?
It arguably did between Matthew and Brady Tkachuk on Friday, July 22, 2022.
It was supposed to be Brady’s night, after all. One day earlier, he and longtime girlfriend Emma Farinacci had announced their engagement. Her family joined the Tkachuks for a celebratory dinner. At one point, Matthew and the boys’ mom, Chantal, disappeared from the table for a while. They eventually re-emerged, and Matthew couldn’t contain himself.
“He pulled me aside and was like, ‘I just signed in Florida, but don’t tell anybody until it becomes official,” Brady Tkachuk said. “And then three minutes later it comes out. It was a pretty unique experience to be there and have my fiancée’s family there.”
Thunder: stolen? Not only was Matthew the talk of the NHL that night, traded away from the Calgary Flames at his request after he’d delivered a 106-point season in 2021-22, but his landing spot was the Florida Panthers. That meant Matthew was hijacking the engagement party with news he was joining Brady in the Atlantic Division.
So should we start mocking up the UFC-style posters now with the Tkachuks, arguably the two best pure throwback power forwards in the NHL today, locking horns three times this season, including twice in the final couple weeks?
Not exactly. It’s complicated. On one hand, the brothers are close. They care about each other enough that they don’t want to hurt each other. The family’s no-fighting rule remains intact.
“It’s for sure set in stone,” Brady said. “That rule will not be broken. But we’re going to have competitive games. It’s just who we are as people and players that we both want to win. I expect more battles, but we’ll never cross the line.”
They’re also convinced they can still root for each other to be successful, even if they acknowledge it won’t quite be the same as Brady decking himself out in Flames colors to crush beers at the Saddledome and root cross-conference for Matthew during the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs – which Matthew loved and defends to this day.
“It’s one of the most special things in the world playing against your brother,” Matthew said. “The Hughes boys (Jack, Quinn, Luke) will tell you the same thing. It’s very hard to do to get two guys in one family who play in the NHL. We don’t look at it like a personal rivalry at all, but our teams are going to be battling for playoff spots, along with a bunch of the other teams in the division. It’s a really solid division this year. The games will matter a lot more, so we’ll ramp it up a bit. But at the end of the day, he’s still my brother and I’ll root for him.”
But the rooting might only last for so long if the Panthers, who gave up a lot to get Matthew this summer, and the Senators, who added many major pieces to support Brady this summer, end up fighting for the same playoff spot, be it one of the three Atlantic slots or an Eastern Conference wildcard position. There’s no denying the competition will feel different than it ever has for the Tkachuks, considering the stakes swirling around both franchises.
For the Panthers? It’s the pressure to follow up on a Presidents’ Trophy season with a deeper playoff run after they were shockingly swept by the Tampa Bay Lightning in Round 2 last spring. The Panthers gave up two key franchise pillars in left winger Jonathan Huberdeau and defenseman MacKenzie Weegar. They also said goodbye to UFAs Mason Marchment, Claude Giroux and Ben Chiarot. They’re not nearly as deep as they were a year ago, so they’re relying on Tkachuk, whom they locked up in a sign-and-trade for eight years at a $9.5 million AAV, to duplicate his superstar performance last season.
He’s very much OK with that. He wants nothing less than a franchise hell-bent on winning. It was a crucial element of his research when he gave the Flames a list of teams to which he’d accept a trade.
“I was on the phone a lot just talking to people, I did a lot of my homework on what the possibilities could be, and not just Florida – other places, but Florida was above the rest of them easily,” Matthew said. “Got the lay of the land about actually being there living in it, just felt super comfortable with it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where you live or where you play, you want to be on a very competitive team that has a chance to win year in and year out, and I think we have that — I know we have that in Florida.”
The pressure should actually be comparatively “easy” for Matthew in Florida. He leaves a division winner in a Canadian market for a place where, as he put it a few weeks back, “I haven’t even looked at a hoodie or pair of pants. This is my first time wearing a shoe with a heel on it in the past few months.”
For Brady, though? The elevated stakes are new. The Senators added Giroux as a free agent, traded for goal scorer Alex DeBrincat, traded for (now injured) goaltender Cam Talbot and added crash-and-bang checker Tyler Motte. Pierre Dorion “won the offseason,” so many of us pundits like to say, and Ottawa is very much expected to improve on last season’s 33-win, 73-point effort.
“People mentioned a lot this summer that it’s the toughest division, and it’s what we want as a team, an organization,” Brady said. “We want that challenge and I want to prove the doubters wrong. This is the most excited I’ve been, and I can speak on behalf of a lot of guys that they’ve been coming into the season with the hype and on how fired up they are to get going.”
So we have 6-foot-2, 202-pound bruiser Matthew Tkachuk, prized acquisition, joining a Stanley-Cup-or-bust franchise. We have 6-foot-4, 211-pound bruiser Brady Tkachuk captaining a team expected to make the playoffs. Are we…sure about that no fighting rule staying intact? The competition is going to be heated in 2022-23, maybe more than the Tkachuks will even understand until they face off for the first time as regular-season divisional rivals on Oct. 29 in Ottawa.
“It’s going to be weird, it’s going to be an adjustment, but we’re both excited for it,” Brady said. “…It’s definitely going to be stressful for our parents, especially my mom. I’m going to feel bad for her.”
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