Oilers Had Matthew Tkachuk Convinced They Were Drafting Him
Matthew Tkachuk (Sergei Belski-Imagn Images)EDMONTON – There are plenty of fish that get away.
The Edmonton Oilers have had their fair share of players that slipped through their fingertips in one fashion or another. But one of those players came to bite them by winning the Stanley Cup against them.
On Monday, former Oilers GM Craig MacTavish and Oilers Now host Bob Stauffer discussed how close the team was to drafting current Florida Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk.
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MacTavish said that Tkachuk had an “unreal” interview with the Oilers before the 2016 draft. Sometime during the interview process, he explained that he had Tkachuk over at his house.
He told a follow-up story about a time he ran into Tkachuk while in St. Louis. He didn’t specify when this story occurred but shared what Matthew thought of the interview.
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“I was out in St. Louis and ran into Matt,” MacTavish reveals. He then said that Tkachuk said this to his Dad (Keith Tkachuk), “I told my Dad when I left your house, ‘this is the team that I think is going to draft me. I’d love to play here.’”
Fortunately (or unfortunately), Calgary drafted Tkachuk and eventually traded him to the Panthers. Instead of drafting Tkachuk, the Oilers picked up Finnish forward Jesse Puljujarvi.
“We had the misfortune of having Puljujarvi fall to us,” MacTavish explained. “Because we were going to take Sergachev. There was a big discussion between Sergachev and Tkachuk. It was almost a positional bias at the time to get a defenseman.”
“But there was plenty of support for Matt.”
There was so much support that someone not in the organization urged the team to select him in the first round of the draft.
Stauffer recalled when current Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch contacted the Oilers Now host to give him his thoughts.
“Kris Knoblauch texted me when the draft lottery results came in,” Stauffer revealed. He reportedly said to Stauffer, “you guys have to take Tkachuk at 4. He’s an absolute pain…and he’s got a lot of skill.”
It’s tough to imagine what the Oilers would have looked like if they had gone in this direction. Either way, Mikhail Sergachev and Tkachuk have become full-time NHLers, while Puljujarvi is still looking to see where he fits.
Now the Oilers can only dream of what could have been and look to the future, hindsight be damned.
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