Tkachuk, MacKinnon Red Hot as Florida Panthers Take On Avs

FORT LAUDERDALE — Matthew Tkachuk and Nathan MacKinnon have been the two best players in the NHL since the calendar turned to 2024.

And they will be on full display when the Florida Panthers and Colorado Avalanche clash on Saturday night.

Tkachuk and MacKinnon each have 27 points in 15 games since Jan. 1, which is one more than Nikita Kucherov for the league lead.

MacKinnon has been dominant all season, scoring 35 goals and 85 points through 52 games this year.

He trails Kucherov, who has 87, for the league lead.

“He’s a freak,” said Evan Rodrigues, a former teammate of MacKinnon’s.

“There is nobody in the league like him that can be that powerful, that strong, that fast. You just try to contain him as much as you can.

“I think the biggest thing is not letting him build up speed in the neutral zone. If you can hit him early in the defensive zone and not let him get his crossovers underneath him, that will be a key to slowing him down, but there’s not much you can do.

“You do what you can to slow him down and try to keep him to the outside and try to make the game difficult on him.”

Tkachuk has turned it on after a slow start after coming off a fractured sternum suffered in the Stanley Cup Final.

Since Dec. 23, he has 12 goals and 32 points in 19 games, sharing the league-lead in points with MacKinnon and David Pastrnak.

If you’re wondering who leads the league in goals in that span, look no further than Tkachuk’s Panthers teammate, Sam Reinhart, who has 20.

Nobody else has more than 15.

A lot of those goals have been thanks in part to Tkachuk feeding him passes from behind the net on the power play, too.

“He is an emotional leader for their team,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said.

“He is heavily involved on the physical side of it, on the offensive side of it,  but there is a competitive turn-on when it comes to the intensity of his game and I feel like they have a lot of players like that. But I’m sure he leads the charge.

“This is a team that is highly competitive and yet skilled and hard in all of the right areas.”