Tkachuk showing signs of reaching full potential

Travis Yost

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Montreal Canadiens winger Brendan Gallagher – one of the league’s most dangerous weapons out of the low slot – has made a career out of terrorizing goaltenders around the net, using his strength and agility to get position on weaker defenders and generate heaps of scoring chances.

It appears Gallagher’s success is inspiring an analogous player in Calgary.

Matthew Tkachuk, a fiery forward who plays a similar style of interior attacking game as Gallagher, has established himself as a top-six forward in this league. Entering his fifth season, the expectation for Tkachuk was to again carry a heavy piece of the scoring burden for the Flames, hopefully getting back to his wondrous 34-goal campaign from two years ago.

Tkachuk, like Gallagher, tends to create his offence through havoc and chaos. And he is quite effective at it!

If there has been one complaint (well, perhaps one “other” complaint) with Tkachuk’s offence, it’s been about untapped potential. When Tkachuk is at his best he is a pest of the highest order, forcing opposing defences into frenzies and generating scoring chances off rush and rebound opportunities at will.

Through the first four seasons, in particular at even strength, Tkachuk has been a pretty predicable player. He’ll generate about 13 shot attempts and 0.8 goals per 60 minutes of play, a fairly hefty volume of offence from the wing:

This is precisely what you want to see from a top-six forward – a player who generates heavy volumes of offence and scores at reliable and predictable rates.

For frame of reference, Tkachuk’s production before the 2020-21 season puts him in the 75th percentile in goal scoring amongst regular forwards and 85th percentile in shot generation.

One thing you will notice – with the full caveat that we are only two weeks into the 2020-21 regular season – is a massive jump in shot rates for Tkachuk this season.

It looks like an outlier, and perhaps it is for a player of Tkachuk’s skill set. But forwards generating north of 20 shots per 60 minutes of play does happen a handful of times in a given season. These forwards tend to already be productive players who see their team dominate territorially when they are on the ice, opening up added shooting opportunities for teammates.

If we look at the past four seasons as an example, you see a common trend of hyper-aggressive and talented forwards who play on good teams capable of hitting this mark, including the aforementioned Gallagher:

What would a Calgary offence look like if Tkachuk was able to sustain this shot profile, maintaining his prolific scoring touch and adding a significant volume of shots to the ledger? It would look something like this (Tkachuk’s shot profiles year-over-year provided courtesy of HockeyViz):

The biggest question for Tkachuk will be sustainability. One of the interesting early season moves made by head coach Geoff Ward was to split Tkachuk from Mikael Backlund, a duo that’s had success for a few years in Calgary. The Flames have paired up Backlund on a separate line with Sam Bennett, leaving Tkachuk to anchor his line with Elias Lindholm and a rotation of Andrew Mangiapane and Dillon Dube. It’s certainly a different look, and it’s one that’s been a boon for the Calgary second line so far.

It’s still early times in Calgary, but the Flames have to be quite encouraged by the leap taken by Tkachuk so far this season.

Data via NHL.com, Hockey Reference, Evolving Hockey, HockeyViz