Florida traded Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar, Cole Schwindt and a first-round pick for Matthew Tkachuk last July
There have been some big moves involving the Florida Panthers during the team’s 30 years of existence.
Both Roberto Luongo trades and the Panthers bringing Pavel Bure and Jaromir Jagr to South Florida come to mind off the top of my head, and even draft day deals for Sam Reinhart and Tomas Vokoun should be mentioned.
It’s hard to view any of those trades in the same light as the one that happened last summer.
The transaction was substantial, but not only at the team level…it shook the entire league down to its foundation.
Saturday marks exactly one year since Panthers General Manager Bill Zito made the colossal move to acquire Matthew Tkachuk from the Calgary Flames in exchange for Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar, Cole Schwindt and a first-round pick.
As part of the deal, Tkachuk signed an 8-year contract extension, making it the first sign-and-trade in NHL history.
At the time, it was a young and budding star in Tkachuk being flipped for an established star in Huberdeau (he had just turned 29 and was coming off a career-high 115-point season), a highly regarded scoring defenseman in Weegar and 2019 third-round pick Cole Schwindt.
That’s a lot of upper echelon talent going both ways.
Time will ultimately tell which team ends up better off from the deal. At first, the consensus was that Calgary had the edge, which was likely attributed to the combination of more players going to the Flames and everyone being judged primarily on their previous season’s body of work.
Here we are, a year later, and views of the trade are quite different.
Huberdeau struggled to find his scoring touch in Calgary, logging a whopping 60 less points in his first season with the Flames, while Weegar scored fewer goals than he had in each of the past three seasons.
Calgary did not make the playoffs.
Tkachuk, meanwhile, followed up a breakout season in Calgary with a career season for the Panthers.
The 25-year-old finished with 40 goals and 109 points and was a finalist for the Hart Trophy, but it was what he did during the playoffs that really opened some eyes.
Tkachuk stepped up, scoring the biggest of goals in the biggest of moments, while leading Florida to its first Stanley Cup Appearance since 1996.
His leadership on and off the ice proved invaluable on a young team still building its identity.
Florida now has one of the closest and tight-knot locker rooms in the league and Tkachuk is as big a part of that growing camaraderie as anyone.
The ascending hockey dynamo is under contract with the Panthers through 2030 and still has his prime years to look forward to.
A year from now we could be having a different conversation about this trade, but on the one year anniversary, Tkachuk and the Panthers certainly appear to have emerged smelling like roses.