The international sports superstar’s first team?
It was the Creve Coeur Comets.
And the team’s colors, a harbinger I suppose, were red, white and blue — the same colors Matthew Tkachuk wears in the National Hockey League … and the same colors he wore in the 4 Nations Face-Off.
“It was ‘learn to play.’ We had a great little team,” said Tkachuk’s first coach, Mark Kunin. “I just remember we used to rotate goalie pads, and Matthew was a great goalie. And I remember (his parents) saying: ‘He can take his turn, but there’s no way in hell he’s going to be a goalie!’ ”
Florida’s Matthew Tkachuk controls the puck in front of Blues goalie Joel Hofer in a game on Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025, at Enterprise Center.
Connor Hamilton, Associated Press
The St. Louis kid — son of Chantal and Keith Tkachuk — has led the Florida Panthers to their third consecutive Stanley Cup Final. Last year, Tkachuk and the boys won the iconic chalice. The year before, Tkachuk fractured his sternum in the Cup Final and Florida lost to Vegas.
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I believe Florida will win the Stanley Cup again in 2025 — the depth and fire of this team will prove too overwhelming, yet again, for Edmonton.
Tkachuk, now 27, has scored more points than games played in each of the past four seasons. And to make the Cup Final this year, he tallied seven points in the five games against Carolina in the Eastern Conference Final.
Even without the result of this year’s Cup Final, for Florida to make the past three, it puts that team in a historic echelon, notably in the salary cap era. So I was curious what his first team was. Chantal shared that it was those Creve Coeur Comets. Tkachuk was born in December of 1997 — his pops played for the then-Phoenix Coyotes. But Keith, an All-Star affectionately known as ‘Walt,’ was sent to St. Louis when his son was 3.
“And, you know, just like anybody else, put their kids in the learn to play program over there,” Kunin said. “There were Sunday mornings and we would have ice at 8 o’clock in the morning, and ‘Big Walt’ would be up in the stands reading the newspaper, and I’d be down on the ice with the kids.
“They just were having fun out there. You had kids who were having fun and you had kids who just wanted to get off the ice. I always said that was the goal at that age — to make sure they wanted to come to the rink the next day.”
And if you haven’t caught it yet, Kunin is the father of a NHL player, too — Luke Kunin, who has played eight seasons so far, who was one of the other kids on the Comets. Young Tkachuk happened to join the same team as young Kunin — it was the genesis of a generation. They continued to play together. The St. Louis Rockets. Then the AAA Blues. And other budding players grew with them. It was like this almost magical situation. They all got great — and made each other even greater. And in the 2016 NHL Draft, five of the St. Louis boys were drafted in the first round.
Tkachuk went seventh, Clayton Keller (an All-Star) went eighth, Logan Brown went 11th, Kunin went 15th and Trent Frederic, he of the roofing family, went 29th. Sure enough, Frederic is now on the Edmonton Oilers and will face Tkachuk in the Cup Final, beginning Wednesday.
“I absolutely watch Matthew — I watch all the guys,” said Mark Kunin, who was in Minnesota visiting Luke and Mark’s first grandkid. “I know all the boys keep in contact with each other. Luke and Matthew, they obviously they go back to when they were 4 or 5. …
“With Matthew, you know, the puck finds him. And he’s just such a disturber — he just gets under everybody’s skin. You just love that. But he truly makes it look easy, because the puck does find him in front of the net there. Certainly the puck wasn’t finding anybody at 5 years old.”
What makes Tkachuk elite isn’t, simply, his hockey skillset. It’s also his mindset. He plays fearless hockey — sometimes even ruthless hockey. He’ll hit anyone and he’ll say anything to anyone. He is, as we see in sports, the kind of player fans (and, frankly, players) hate if he’s on the other team … and love if he’s on your team. In the last round, for instance, Carolina star Sebastian Aho injured one of Florida’s stars, Sam Reinhart. So in the next game, as described by ESPN reporter Greg Wyshynski: “Tkachuk went after Aho with a series of shoves and cross-checks, eventually putting him in a headlock and bringing him down to the ice.”
Tkachuk has always been this way — it’s in his DNA. He’ll sacrifice his body and his likability for the sake of, well, anything, any moment, that could help his team toward a victory. And his country. There he was, in the now-renowned first-ever 4 Nations Face-Off, dropping the gloves, along with teammate and brother, Brady. It was a huge moment — it set the tone that 4 Nations wasn’t some All-Star Game event; this was hockey players fighting on ice for their country (figuratively and literally).
“One of his great strengths is his ‘hockey awareness’ on the ice, on the bench, before and after the games,” former NHL goalie and former Blues broadcaster Darren Pang told me Saturday. “He has the ability to find weakness in the opposition players and try to get in their kitchen as much as he can. He rattles their pans! And as a player, no one is better from the goal line to the net and crease. His down-low ability separates him from the rest.”
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