2020-21 Reasonable Expectations: Matthew Tkachuk

We’re not quite sure when hockey will return for the 2020-21 season – aside from that it’ll be in 2021 – but several Calgary Flames players are headed towards pivotal campaigns. As we prepare for 2020-21, we’re digging into the likely Flames roster player by player to determine what we can expect from them.

First up: let’s set some reasonable expectations for one of the Flames’ most important players, Matthew Tkachuk.

Born in Arizona but raised in the St. Louis area, Tkachuk was a highly-coveted prospect in American hockey circles. After an impressive 17-year-old season with the U.S. National Development Team – where he trailed only Auston Matthews offensively – he opted to take a unique path for his 18-year-old season, joining the Ontario Hockey League’s London Knights.

The gamble worked, as Tkachuk’s breakthrough 2015-16 season in major junior solidified his draft status and allowed him to win a Memorial Cup, as well as be named one of the OHL’s best players. He was selected by the Flames sixth overall in the 2016 NHL Draft.

Tkachuk made the Flames roster out of camp in 2016-17 and has seemingly found his footing as one of the NHL’s smartest two-way players – and premier agitators – after a bit of a turbulent early tenure that saw him suspended a handful of times, most notably for elbowing Los Angeles Kings defender Drew Doughty in the face.

Since figuring out where the NHL’s disciplinary line is drawn, Tkachuk has become arguably the heart and soul of the Flames group. For the better part of four full NHL seasons he’s played with Mikael Backlund and a rotating cast of wingers – most notably Michael Frolik (3M Line 1.0) and Andrew Mangiapane (3M Line 2.0) – and was routinely matched up with the other team’s top offensive units, a consequence of playing with Backlund.

Despite the tough sledding assignment-wise, Tkachuk has performed quite well (and occasionally excelled). He’s scored 20-plus goals in the past three seasons and led the Flames offensively in the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season, ending Johnny Gaudreau’s four season streak as the club’s leading point-getter.

2019-20 was the first year of a three year bridge deal for Tkachuk with a $7 million cap hit that led all players on the team. With Gaudreau, Mark Giordano and Sean Monahan stumbling a bit in 2019-20, he became their best and most important player. His absence for the chunk of the Flames’ playoff series with Dallas coincided with their most scattered play of the post-season, even taking into account their opposition.

When the NHL season begins at some point in 2021, Tkachuk will be a 23-year-old with nearly 300 NHL games under his belt. He’s an alternate captain, sharing an A with Backlund, and widely considered the heir apparent to Giordano as team captain. While last season he had the team’s highest cap hit, 2020-21 is the first season where he’ll make the most actual money of any player on the team (at $7 million, before any escrow or deferrals).

In terms of usage, it’s yet to be determined how Geoff Ward will tinker with his lines. With Ward suggesting he’ll use Lindholm as a centre, that could lead to the return of Tkachuk playing with him and Mangiapane. Considering that Backlund is the de facto tough minutes pivot in Calgary, that could open up Tkachuk’s line for easier deployments and give him more opportunity for offense. (It won’t be likely that Tkachuk will be beating up on bottom six opponents, but playing more often against second liners could give his unit a boost.) Regardless of who he plays with, Tkachuk’s a prominent enough player that other teams will be targeting him with match-ups to quiet his offensive output, but the hope among Flames brass is likely that the team’s renewed depth will make it tougher to isolate him during a game.

Tkachuk has had four seasons of positive Relative Corsi despite some tough usage, and in small samples away from Backlund he’s shown the ability to drive play – though it helps that he’s often played with Mangiapane, who excels at entering the offensive zone with speed (and the puck). It will be interesting to see if Tkachuk’s personal shooting percentage normalizes a bit – it dropped to 9.16% at five on five (from 12.32% in 2018-19) and 12.23% overall (from 16.43%), but he was still generating quality scoring chances. Only Mangiapane had a higher expected goals percentage among Flames forwards. If Tkachuk can keep doing what he did in 2019-20, his puck luck bouncing back could boost his offensive totals a fair amount.

It sounds wild to say, but the expectations for Tkachuk when hockey resumes is for him to be the team’s best player. He’s entering his peak performance years and while he’s obviously been learning and becoming more situationally aware, it’s time for him to really start applying what he’s been learning over the past few seasons and being an in-game difference-maker on a consistent basis. Based on past performance, it’s reasonable to expect him to be the team’s most reliable offensive player (scoring around a point per game), one of their most productive even strength players, a shutdown presence head-to-head with the other team’s top guns, and a cerebral agitator who provokes key opponents to take dumb penalties at key times of games (while staying out of the box himself).

Basically, he should reasonably be expected to play against every team the way he does against the Edmonton Oilers.