Welcome to Tkachuk world. This is where goals are everything; and we don't mean team goals. It is quite common to have a team's leading scorer as the captain, provided he is of strong moral fibre and is capable of putting the team's needs ahead of his own selfish motivations. Keith Tkachuk should not be the captain of the Phoenix Coyotes.
This is not simply based on his outburst during the Calgary game, an event merely symptomatic of the problem. Tkachuk has a long and storied history of putting his own ego and monetary desires ahead of his team.
Keith Tkachuk smashed and scored his way to the Hockey News's High IQ Award (combining intimidation, through penalty minutes, with goal-scoring prowess) for two years in a row in 1994 and 1995, finishing only second to Eric Lindros in '96. Last season he became the first American-born player to lead the league in goals, all the while accumulating 228 penalty minutes. HE didn't do it with Eric Lindros and Mikael Renberg feeding him, either.
But numbers will never tell you who is adding to their team through leadership. Marcel Dionne scored over 1700 points in his career, but his playoff history makes Mike Gartner look like Jean Beliveau. 52 goals is 52 goals, but is a three-goal night against a bottom-feeder team more important than showing the leadership that would lift the ENTIRE team to greater heights against the best competition night in, night out?
For all his attempts at increasing his monetary wealth, Tkachuk has never been a poor man. Heading into his option year, he was handed a controversial two million (canadian), dollar contract. But trouble was brewing ahead.
Tkachuk became a restricted Group II free agent back in the summer of '95, and showed little interest in returning to the Winnipeg Jets, the team he captained. Tkachuk would have everyone believe that he never wanted out of Winnipeg. In actuality, he was invisible during that summer. He missed all of training camp, but signed a 5-year, $17 million dollar contract with the Chicago Blackhawks and it had teeth marks all over it.
Long before Joe Sakic's front-loaded deal came Tkachuk's contract that had six million of those dollars stacked up front in the first year. If the Rangers thought a team like Colorado couldn't match their offer to Sakic, then certainly Tkachuk and the Blackhawks knew that Winnipeg, the second smallest market in the NHL, would be severely troubled in doing the same. In fact, the only reason the Jets were able to match it was because the taxpayers (whose government was propping up the mounting losses) who would be stuck with the bill. The team knew it was going to Phoenix the following summer but the people of Winnipeg would be stuck with over a third of his contract in that first of five years.
Winnipeg matched it on October 3rd, immediately compared to the week long wait for Sakic, due to the season opening four days later. Tkachuk actually proffered up the point that he had a golf game with Paddock right before July 1st in which Paddock said to him that he would just match any offer and that Tkachuk should just field other offers. Right...
That story doesn't match with the verbal tirade G.M. John Paddock was having to the press in the middle of September, when he said ''They never contacted us; if he doesn't want to come back he should come out and say''. Hardly two people working in unison.
What makes it all the more ridiculous is that Tkachuk hadn't skated all during September. Most players work themselves to death to keep in shape during unsigned periods. Tkachuk heard some loud boos in the team's home opener against Dallas which were only exacerbated when he pulled a groin in his second game and missed three more.
Now, nobody will deny a working man his right to get whatever monies can come to him but when one is the captain, one must adhere to certain principles inherent with the position. Comments to Mark Brender of the Hockey News in a November 17, 1995 piece stating "I got my money" or in a February 9th piece, by Winnipeg reporter Tim Campbell, saying ''People don't realize I was given that money'' are not what focusing on team goals are all about. All year, the monotony never ended. By August of 1996, his power to separate himself from the team was omnipresent.
What Tkachuk refers in the quote below is what happened during the unsigned period in early October of 1995. Terry Simpson was the coach of the team at that time and, unsure that Tkachuk was even going to play for the Jets ever again, handed the captaincy over to Kris King. Rather than bow his head and accept the coach's decision, he tore apart any cohesion between coach, management and players. ''I'll never forget what they did to me. It was wrong. It wasn't my fault they gave it (the money) to me.'' How many teams in the history of the NHL have succeeded with a captain more concerned for his own ego gratification, not to mention a warped sense of economics? How many teams have succeeded when they declare public warfare on their coach and G.M?
Perhaps Tkachuk should have been concentrating on his own play during the playoffs of 1996 when the six million dollar man potted one goal against Detroit in the opening round and was part of a power-play that went 0 for 28. Without the sparkling play of second-year goalie Nikolai Khabibulin, a four-game sweep would have been all the departing for Phoenix, Tkachuk-''led'' Jets left for their white-shirted faithful.
To most leaders in the NHL, their money is earned in the playoffs, where raising one's level of play a notch is fundamental to team success. For all of Phoenix's individual talent, they have yet to win a round in Tkachuk's existence; Tkachuk has played like a cowboy, potting 14 goals in 26 games yet adding a pathetic two assists; Tkachuk vanished when needed most in last year's Game 7 against the Ducks of Anaheim as Phoenix was shut out, and will be lucky this year to make the playoffs.
Some would say Tkachuk is a ''money player'' as a default judgment was earned against him on March 27th, 1996. Tkachuk allegedly used information from a Mr. Sabharwal to place bets illegally on NFL games through a bookmaker in Boston between October 1995 and January 1996. The man contended Tkachuk agreed orally to share winnings with him.
Tkachuk denied it, threatening to file a $1 million dollar countersuit. The NHL investigated and somehow found it to be meritless. Apparently captain Tkachuk was served with the lawsuit in late February during a road trip to Calgary and threw the papers in his bag ''and forgot about them'', according to his agent. And Barry Switzer forgot about that little ol' gun.
Again, nobody denies Keith can score goals and nobody denies accidents happen. But repeated incidents lead to one conclusion and that is that Tkachuk is not the ''man for the job'' as former coach Don Hay called him when re-instating him as captain in the summer of 1996. There can be no more damning statement of this then what occurred at the beginning of the 1997 season.
When asked back in August of 1996 whether or not he could handle the drop off in salary from six million to the approximately three million for the remaining four years on the contract, Tkachuk flatly stated ''Don't make an issue of it, because it's not one.'' Little did Phoenix fans know how much of an issue Tkachuk was going to make of it.
Players in professional sport are portrayed as money-grubbing scum all too often by a jealous, bitter portion of the populace but EVERYONE agrees that when an athlete signs a contract, he should live by that contract until its end, or until the team gets stupid and re-negotiates it early.
Team captain Tkachuk was suspended on Friday September 26th, 1997 for threatening to hold out and not play the final exhibition game plus, at least the season-opener. Most men will publicly ask for a renegotiation but Tkachuk, as is his habit, secretly undermined his team with his threat on walking out if they didn't re-do a contract that was only TWO years old!
Poor Keith felt that two and a half plus million a season wasn't enough. His basic grasp of economics failed to inform him that he had received six million the first year, as was the nature of the front-loaded contract. In one of his few smart moves, General Manager Bobby Smith sent the team ''captain'' home.
"This is a team that hasn't won a playoff round in 10 years, and to assemble what I feel is a very good team and then have one of the top players refuse to play, it's very disappointing," Smith said.
"We had a long talk with Bob (Smith) yesterday about playing this contract out," said Tkachuk. "I wanted to play here, and if I sat out, who knows how long it would have been, but it wouldn't have been any good for myself or the team. Stuff like that would have been a little bitter. I'm not going to worry about money now. If you look around the league right now, there are teams that are renegotiating deals. Different teams have different ways of handling situations."
If Tkachuk had been stripped of his captaincy for being a Group II free agent, it boggles the mind to believe that he is still worthy of being captain after such an episode. ''Stuff like that would have been a little bitter'' indeed. Few have faith that Tkachuk will not ''worry about money now''. Perhaps he is saving all that worry for the playoffs.
Phoenix will be lucky to make the playoffs and Tkachuk's recent comments will have a hand in this. Much like when Mario Lemieux stabbed his team in the back by meddling in management affairs, Keith has done the same. Lemieux held a gun to G.M. Craig Patrick's head during the off-season of 1996, saying that if the team didn't find better players to play with ''him'', he MAY consider not coming back.
Now, how exactly did Mario figure this was going to make it easier for Patrick to acquire better players via trades? If you are an opposing G.M. and you have a chance to severely weaken an opposing team by ridding them of the Art Ross winner, would you not ask for the moon in trades, knowing that Patrick had to get players to keep Mario ''happy''?
Tkachuk made the same calculated move in early November 1997 when he took his feelings about Oleg Tverdovsky's contract (or lack thereof) status to the media. Tkachuk said G.M. Bobby Smith should sign him for the money he is asking as he is an extremely valuable member of the team. A nice sentiment but Tkachuk knew he was stabbing Smith in the back. Now Smith is even deeper under the gun as most fans will take the side of their captain over management. But this is how Phoenix operates. ''Getting'' management for all the dollars they are worth is the key factor, and they are led in this by their captain.
A captain is a person who is suppose to speak with distinction, setting an example for his teammates, his franchise, and his city. He is NOT supposed to hamper management's efforts to run the team (as he has done in BOTH cities). He is NOT supposed to participate in swear-a-thons or incite other teams by publicly bashing them.
