Keith Tkachuk Was a Damn Good Power Forward
The 5-time All-Star for the Coyotes and Blues is the father of today's bruising scorers — both figuratively and literally.
At long last, welcome back to the Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players — where we pay tribute to the overlooked athletes from throughout history who haven’t gotten their proper due.
I’ve had the Tkachuks on my mind over the past few weeks, with brothers Matthew and Brady ranking among the United States’ leading scorers — and fighters — at the recent 4 Nations Face-Off. Throughout the tournament, the broadcasts loved to highlight the entire Tkachuk family, which also includes their sister Taryn, their mother Chantal and their father Keith, who now may be known mostly as the enthusiastic hockey dad who helped produce one of the greatest pair of brothers in NHL history.
But make no mistake: In his day, Keith Tkachuk was one hell of a player, too. And he came along at the perfect time in hockey history to become synonymous with a specific role that still lives on to this day.
The concept of the NHL “power forward” is one that immediately annoyed purists when it started entering popular use in the 1990s. It was originally stolen from basketball, at a time when star PFs like Charles Barkley and Karl Malone captured fans’ imaginations by combining scoring skills, rugged rebounding and nasty attitudes. As the NHL found itself in an arms race with the NBA when it came to ‘90s coolness, a little borrowing was fair game — and thus, hockey suddenly had a term for its own players who combined physicality and a knack for finding the net.
Enter Tkachuk, the Massachusetts native and Boston University alum who was taken 19th overall by the Winnipeg Jets in the 1990 NHL draft. The strapping 6-foot-2, 200+ pound, 19-year-old winger made his NHL debut on Feb. 28, 1992, scoring his first career goal about a week later. He’d tack on a few more in the regular season, and even scored 3 in the Jets’ opening-round loss to the Vancouver Canucks, foreshadowing production to come.
The biggest star in hockey at that time was, of course, Wayne Gretzky — nobody’s idea of a hulking physical specimen. (Who needs brawn when you can think 10 moves ahead of the competition?) But after a high-flying 1980s era of speed and increasing finesse, the ‘90s NHL was becoming obsessed with players who could mix size, strength and skill in the same package. At 6-4 / 230, Mario Lemieux was the prototype; his heirs in the next generation included Eric Lindros (6-4 / 240), John LeClair (6-3 / 226), Kevin Stevens (6-3 / 230), Brendan Shanahan (6-3 / 220), Keith Primeau (6-5 / 220), Gary Roberts (6-2 / 215), Bill Guerin (6-2 / 220), Todd Bertuzzi (6-3 / 229), Cam Neely (6-1 / 218) and Owen Nolan (6-1 / 214).
Tkachuk was squarely in that group, too. At age 20 in 1992-93, he used his already-imposing frame to score 28 goals; by the following season, he was named captain of the Jets — the youngest player to wear the “C” in the league — and notched 41 goals, tied for 15th in the NHL. Within a few years, Tkachuk joined the 50-goal club for the first time during the Jets’ 1995-96 swan song in Winnipeg, then reached an archetypal power-forward milestone in his Phoenix debut of 1996-97: Tkachuk became the first player in NHL history to lead the league in goals while accruing 200+ penalty minutes.
At the same time, the Coyotes seemed to be building something interesting in the desert, with Tkachuk leading a burgeoning core that also included G Nikolai Khabibulin, Ds Oleg Tverdovsky and Teppo Numminen, and Fs Craig Janney and newly minted HOFer Jeremy Roenick. The team ranked among the Top 10 in scoring each season from 1995-98, and made the playoffs every year from 1996-2000.
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None of that promise extended beyond Round 1 of the playoffs, however, with Phoenix losing at that stage in five consecutive seasons. Tkachuk scored 12 goals with 21 points in 31 postseason games during that stretch — well down from his regular-season averages per game — while he was also a minus-7 and the Coyotes mostly struggled to score in those series (aside from when they put up a respectable 18 goals in 6 games against the defending champion Red Wings in 1997).
Still, Tkachuk had signed a lucrative new contract with Phoenix right before the 1998-99 season, and both of his sons were born in nearby Scottsdale. Though negotiations with the Coyotes were at times contentious, he seemed ready to be the franchise’s captain for the long haul.
But as financial difficulties kept mounting — the team was in the process of losing an estimated $13.9 million in 2000-01 — Tkachuk could see the writing on the wall by the turn of the 2000s. A trade was going to send him packing soon. That deal happened on March 13, 2001, when the Coyotes shipped their leader to the St. Louis Blues for a handful of players and a first-round pick.
"I knew it was coming," Tkachuk said. "They told me this deal was obviously financial. I really, really wanted to stay here and try to win a (Stanley) Cup, but I'm going to a better situation. This team — the St. Louis Blues — is committed to winning. They have some great players there, and I'm looking forward to getting out of the first round."
It was fair to say the Blues had higher expectations than the Coyotes did. St. Louis had been knocking on the door in the Western Conference for a long time, making the playoffs in 21 consecutive seasons (and counting) by that point, but never making a Stanley Cup Final. Most recently, they had won the 1999-00 President’s Trophy as the league’s best regular-season team, only to suffer a stunning first-round upset against the San Jose Sharks. The Blues were deep, experienced, and built to win — but they lacked a wrecking-ball forward like Tkachuk, someone with the hands to score and the edge to intimidate.
After scoring 6 goals in 12 games to close the regular season with his new teammates, Tkachuk had 8 points in the first 10 games of the 2001 playoffs as St. Louis got revenge on the Sharks and knocked off the defending West champ Dallas Stars with the surprising ease of a sweep. But he struggled in the conference finals against an outrageously good Colorado Avalanche squad, who held Tkachuk to a single point (zero goals) in their 4-1 series win.1
Disappointingly, that was as close as Tkachuk would get to a Stanley Cup in St. Louis. The Blues would run up their postseason appearance streak to 25 consecutive seasons by 2003-04, nearly an all-time NHL record.2 But they trended in the wrong direction — losing in Round 2 in 2002, and Round 1 in both 2003 and 2004. On the other side of the lockout, they missed the playoffs entirely for the first time since 1978-79.
By then, Tkachuk was in his mid-30s and was battling both injuries and issues with his weight. After having one of the worst seasons of his career in 2005-06, he bounced back with 20 goals to start the year with St. Louis — but Tkachuk was also due to be a free agent at the end of the season, the Blues were going nowhere, and the Atlanta Thrashers were desperate to push for the first playoff appearance in franchise history. So Atlanta went all-in with multiple first-round picks to trade for a little under two months of Tkachuk’s services.
In one sense, it worked: Tkachuk had 7 goals and 15 points (with a +8 rating) in 18 games as a Thrasher, and Atlanta went 12-6 in his appearances to lock up the No. 3 seed in the East. But up against Jaromír Jágr, Michael Nylander (Willy’s dad) and the New York Rangers in the first round, the Thrashers were outclassed in a 4-0 sweep. It wasn’t Tkachuk’s fault — he had a goal, 3 points and a +2 rating in 4 games — but Atlanta’s big move to acquire a star failed to get them anywhere in the end.
And then, Tkachuk just turned around and re-signed with the Blues anyway. Back in St. Louis again, the man they called “Big Walt” was productive for a couple more years, scoring 52 total goals across the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons — one of which was No. 500 in his career, making him the fourth American-born player to achieve that milestone. Later, he would also notch career point No. 1,000, becoming the seventh American to join that club as well.
Following a 13-goal, 32-point campaign at age 37 in 2009-10, Tkachuk hung up his skates as an NHL player. He ended his 18-year career with some pretty impressive numbers: 538 goals (212 on the power-play), 527 assists, 1,065 points and, of course, 55 fights and 2,219 penalty minutes. For what it’s worth, he also added five goals in seven games for the gold medal-winning U.S. team at the 1996 World Cup of Hockey, and was a four-time Olympian for Team USA during its era of rapid improvement.
One would think the Hockey Hall of Fame would await, and certainly Tkachuk has been recognized by some Hall-adjacent organizations: He was named to both the USA Hockey HOF and the St. Louis Blues HOF, for instance. But while he has been a candidate for the fancy museum on Yonge St. in Toronto, Tkachuk somehow hasn’t gotten the call yet. He is currently the third-leading retired3 goal-scorer to not be in the Hall of Fame, trailing Jagr and Patrick Marleau (both of whom either retired far more recently — or didn’t retire at all, in the case of Jagr).
Beyond the topline numbers, Tkachuk’s greater legacy — and best claim to the HOF — might be in his status as one of the most effective power forwards ever, helping to usher in the archetype that continues to have players carry its banner into the present.
We can look at NHL forwards on a spectrum between pure scoring skill and pure violence by plotting out their goals per game against penalty minutes, with both adjusted for league norms and roster sizes. Here’s every player with at least 500 adjusted games4 since the dawn of the Original Six era in 1942-43:
At the left side of the chart are the pure snipers: players like Gretzky, Pavel Bure, Brett Hull, Mike Bossy, and even Lemieux, Auston Matthews and Alex Ovechkin — guys with the size to mix it up physically if needed, but who largely focused on scoring with skill rather than brute force. On the other end to the right, we see players who more fit the “goon” archetype — enforcers like Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, who had the hands to score 20 goals on one occasion, but was more known for putting the “bully” in the Broad Street Bullies.
The sweet spot for the power forward is right in the middle, where you find stars like Lindros, Maurice Richard and “Terrible” Ted Lindsay — who were legendary for both their talent and their physicality.
Keith Tkachuk is right there next to them as well, a testament to his elite combination of goal-scoring touch and grit in front of the net. And incredibly, so are his sons: Matthew and Brady rank among the biggest wrecking-ball scorers in NHL history as well, tracking for nearly as many adjusted goals per game as their father with even more penalty minutes after adjusting for era.
If that’s the elder Tkachuk’s strongest Hall of Fame pitch, it’s a pretty great one to be able to make. Not only was he arguably the greatest power forward to emerge from the era when that style first entered the hockey parlance, but he sired what might be the two players who best exemplify that style in the modern game.
So at a moment when we’re celebrating all things Tkachuk brothers — a couple of young stars who embody the controlled violence that still rests at the beating heart of this untamed winter sport — it’s time we also give correct credit to the man who helped mold them in his own image of toughness and skill.
Filed under: NHL, Hall of Good
Which sounds more lopsided than it was — three of the five games went into overtime, including a double-OT win by St. Louis in Game 3.
The Bruins and Blackhawks had streaks of 29 and 28 seasons, respectively, starting around the beginning of the Expansion Era.
Retired from the NHL, that is. Jagr’s prolonged post-NHL career in Czechia complicates these kinds of queries.
Meaning shortened seasons were prorated up to 82-game schedules.