Ottawa Senators left wing Brady Tkachuk celebrates his goal against the New Jersey Devils at Prudential Center.Ed Mulholland/Reuters
The Face of the Franchise looks like it should be standing in a corner of the classroom. Or out in the hall. Or reporting to the principal’s office.
Brady Tkachuk may be 25 years old, 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds, but there is a child-like Dennis-the-Menace quality to him that has endeared him to the fans of the Ottawa Senators and infuriates whatever team he might be playing against.
Next up happens to be Sunday against the Toronto Maple Leafs in round one of the 2025 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Let the Battle of Ontario, which last played out while Brady Tkachuk was still a child in St. Louis, MO, begin.
This past week, when the Senators finally clinched a spot in the postseason while on the road, new owner Michael Andlauer, who took over the team in June, 2023, placed two quick calls. First was to general manager Steve Staios, who masterminded the rebuilding of a team that had gone eight years without a playoff game. The second was to Tkachuk, who sat out the game with a lingering injury. (He is, however, expected to return to play Sunday, after suiting up in the team’s regular-season finale.)
“I reached out to him,” Andlauer told Ottawa media before Friday’s home victory against the Montreal Canadiens, “and just told him how happy I was for him, in light of everything he’s gone through and to be in this position now.”
That would be 500-plus NHL games without so much as a whiff of playoff hockey. “He is everything that Ottawa fans believe in him,” Andlauer added. “He cares so much, both on and off the ice.”
Beyond Ottawa, the feisty, hypercompetitive Tkachuk was a relative unknown until February’s 4 Nations Face-Off, when Brady and older brother, Matthew, both on Team U.S.A., opened their game against Canada by dropping their gloves virtually the moment the puck dropped. The brothers and teammate J.T. Miller filled the penalty box by starting three fights within the opening nine seconds of the match.
The Americans went on to win that game, though lost in the final to Canada in overtime. They may have lost the tournament, but the Tkachuk brothers won all the attention.
“He and Matthew became two of the most popular people in America during the 4 Nations Face-Off,” says ESPN play-by-play broadcaster Sean McDonough.
“Watching Brady,” says Matthew Tkachuk, the elder by nearly two years, “was legit the most proud I’ve ever been. It was so surreal, just awesome.”
Matthew believes that the fight – seen as meaningless and foolish by many – was strategic and smart. “At the end of the day,” he told media shortly after the game, “a fight is a fight. You’re going there to beat the other guy up. But I think it was more than that. It was more to show your teammates, ‘We got this, we’re together in this … we’re in this and we’re going to fight together.’”
“The playoffs,” said broadcaster P.K. Subban, a former player, this week, “are tailor-made for Brady Tkachuk with his game and his mentality.”
The Tkachuk brothers’ father, Keith (Walt) Tkachuk, played 18 years in the NHL for, among other teams, the Winnipeg Jets and St. Louis Blues. He, too, was both a physical and a scoring threat – with more than 500 goals and 2,200 penalty minutes in his long career.
Jon Cooper, the two-time Stanley Cup winner with Tampa Bay Lightning, considers Brady Tkachuk’s decision to join his older brother in that opening faceoff fight was his “coming-out party.”
“When you’re inside the league,” Cooper said recently, “you know what type of player Brady Tkachuk is and how good he is.”
Cooper points to the much-changed lineup of the modern Senators – young players like defenceman Jake Sanderson, Dylan Cozens, acquired this winter by trade, emerging scorer Drake Batherson, wily veterans Claude Giroux and David Perron, new goaltender Linus Ullmark – and says that the league is now aware that “there are a lot of really good players on that team.
“There is a reason they’re where they are. [Brady]’s a huge physical presence for them, he can tilt the game, not only with a goal, but with a hit.”
Andlauer would add defenceman Thomas Chabot to that list of players who have changed the team. Chabot played but a single game back in 2016-17, the last year the Senators reached the playoffs.
Chabot, like Tkachuk, was drafted by Ottawa and had to live through the long postseason drought. “They’re hungry for the playoffs,” says Andlauer. “And now they can taste it.”
General manager Staios says his Senators are “underdogs – and we’re okay with that.”
Chabot gives much of the credit to new coach Travis Green and his staff.
“We were getting a lot of the same message for a couple years,” Chabot told local media.
“Right from the start, everything was all about details in training camp. It was really going back to the basics. … At the end of the day, we know that it is for the best of the team. It’s about winning.”
“We needed to change the level of accountability throughout the organization,” says Staios, who is widely credited for the sea of change in Ottawa.
Tkachuk is expected to be back playing for the opening round and can’t wait. “I don’t think I’d ever miss an opportunity to play in the playoffs,” he said recently.
“I don’t like watching. …”
Earlier this week, Tkachuk was named the Senators’ nominee for the NHL’s Clancy Memorial Trophy that goes “to the player who best exemplifies leadership qualities on and off the ice and who has made a noteworthy humanitarian contribution to his community.”
“He’s the most genuine son that you’ll ever have,” the elder Tkachuk says of his younger boy. “Always cares about his mother and I, and just a genuinely down to earth, lovable kid.” This is, however, not an opinion shared by those players the younger son will face this spring.