Brady Tkachuk scored a natural hat trick for the Florida Panthers on Tuesday, October 13th. He scored another one Thursday, October 15th, and this one ended with the overtime winner. Nobody in the league has done that in back-to-back games since 1986, and somehow this is the quietest historic streak of the year, buried under a baseball postseason that doesn’t even involve him.
Ottawa traded Brady Tkachuk to Florida back in June, and on paper it was the responsible move: two first-round picks, a future protected first, and a second, the type of return a front office puts in a press release with a straight face. Four months later he’s reunited with his brother Matthew, skating for a team that’s won back-to-back games on his stick, and he’s the first player with back-to-back natural hat tricks since 1986. Ottawa’s return was always a bet on 2029. Tkachuk is cashing out in October.
Forty years is a stupidly long time to wait for someone to run it back.
The only guy to ever pull this off before him was Petri Skriko, a winger for the Vancouver Canucks, back in November 1986. The symmetry here is almost too clean: Thursday’s game, the one with the overtime winner, came against Vancouver. Forty years later, the last team to see this happen got to watch it happen to them again.
Tkachuk didn’t score a goal in his first six games this season.
Then, across three days, he put up six goals against Columbus and Vancouver: the third time in Florida Panthers history a player has run back-to-back natural hat tricks, and the fifth hat trick of his own career. Matthew Tkachuk assisted on all three goals Tuesday and the first one Thursday, because reuniting the Tkachuk brothers wasn’t just a nice story, it turned into an actual hockey decision.
The league’s own account posted it and it’s worth the twenty seconds:
https://twitter.com/NHL/status/2110912097353892333
None of this makes the Ottawa Senators’ return bad, to be clear. Four high picks is four high picks, and if two or three of them turn into real players by 2029, the trade still looks fine on a cap sheet somewhere. Ottawa ‘winning’ that trade on paper was always the long-term argument, the one built on drafts that haven’t happened yet, the one that lets everybody pretend nothing between now and then counts.
Worth remembering: Tkachuk asked for this. He put up 59 points in 60 games for Ottawa last season before the trade that sent him to Florida became real at the draft, and he wanted out specifically to play alongside his brother. It isn’t a front-office failure; it’s a reminder that players have their own opinions about where they want to be great.
Forty years from now some other winger pulls this off again, and the front office that gave him up is going to be bragging about whatever picks they got for him. Set a reminder to check in on Ottawa in 2029.
