Grading the Brady Tkachuk trade: Sens lose captain to Florida, gain valuable retooling capital

Jun 21, 2026, 20:03 EDTUpdated: Jun 21, 2026, 20:04 EDT

Grading the Brady Tkachuk trade: Sens lose captain to Florida, gain valuable retooling capital

Credit: Keito Newman-Imagn Images

Shockwaves emanated across the hockey world on Sunday as the Ottawa Senators and Florida Panthers consummated a blockbuster trade centered around power winger Brady Tkachuk.

Not long after the end of his eighth season with the Senators, Tkachuk reportedly provided the club with a short list of teams to which he would accept a trade. In the end, he’ll get to go play with his brother in Sunrise, Fla., which hosted the Stanley Cup Parade in both 2024 and 2025.

The Panthers missed the playoffs in 2026, but they clearly still believe their contention window is wide-open. Meanwhile, the Senators are weaker today but have the pieces they need to pivot after trading their captain.

How will things shake out from here? Let’s take a look at all of it in another edition of Daily Faceoff‘s Trade Grades!

FLORIDA PANTHERS

Receive:

LW Brady Tkachuk, 26 – $8.2 million cap hit through 2028

If the Panthers end up winning another Stanley Cup (or two) over the next few years, they might be able to look back at their disjointed 2025-26 season as one of the best things ever to happen to them. After all, if they hadn’t tumbled down the standings and missed the playoffs, they probably wouldn’t have had enough assets to land Brady Tkachuk from Ottawa without dismantling part of their championship-caliber roster.

The Panthers went without Aleksander Barkov for the entirety of the 2025-26 season. Matthew Tkachuk played in just 31 games. Brad Marchand, Sam Reinhart, Anton Lundell, and Seth Jones combined for a total of 96 man-games lost between them. And in goal, Sergei Bobrovsky posted some of the worst numbers of his career, going 27-23-1 with an .877 save percentage in 52 appearances.

All told, it was the perfect set of circumstances for the Panthers to go from dominant back-to-back champs to Atlantic Division also-rans in the blink of an eye. They ended up outside the Eastern Conference playoff picture by a full 15 points. But with Barkov already in fine form again, the Panthers look ready to make another deep playoff run in 2027, and with that goal in mind, their own 2026 first-round pick — suddenly much more valuable than expected — seemed destined to become a trade chip. Now, the Tkachuks have been united.

Brady has always been the lesser Tkachuk brother, but he has his fair share of valuable attributes. For one, he’s a little bigger than Matthew, and while neither brother likes to shy away from a fight, Brady tends to lean a bit more into that side of the game. He’s also a three-time 30-goal scorer with six years of experience wearing the “C” in a Canadian market, and he played an instrumental role in the U.S. men’s national team winning gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics. But with only two years left on his current deal and, per Ottawa Citizen columnist Bruce Garrioch, Tkachuk indicating he “had no plans to re-sign after his contract expired,” Senators GM Steve Staios had to make a move — and Florida took full advantage.

The Panthers laid the groundwork for the Tkachuk deal when they traded Mackie Samoskevich to the Seattle Kraken earlier on Sunday. They also sent Ottawa the 2026 first-round pick (No. 25 overall) they received in that deal. But for a team in Florida’s position, the prospect of assembling a top nine comprised of both Tkachuks, Barkov, Reinhart, Marchand, Sam Bennett, Carter Verhaeghe, Anton Lundell, and Eetu Luostarinen vastly outstrips the value of any combination of draft picks. Maybe Brady isn’t as good as Matthew, maybe he’s overrated, maybe Ottawa made the right call to trade him — more on that in a second — but the Panthers just made an already scary forward group even harder to play against. The only real question is whether they should’ve allocated some of those assets toward a long-term fix in net, but it feels like they’ll just re-sign Bobrovsky and bet on him bouncing back.

The NHL might not be a true dynastic league anymore, but the Sun Belt just keeps getting stronger and stronger. Don’t be surprised if Florida starts the 2026-27 season with the shortest Stanley Cup odds of the bunch.

Grade: A

OTTAWA SENATORS

Receive:

2026 first-round pick (No. 9 overall)
2026 first-round pick (No. 25 overall)
2029 first-round pick (top-10 protected)
2027 second-round pick

Talk about a haul. This is one of the strongest picks-only trade returns in recent NHL history, with the Sens adding three more first-rounders and an additional second-rounder to their stockpile not long after having their own 2026 first-round pick reinstated by the NHL. Ottawa now possesses picks No. 9, 25, and 32 in this year’s first round, and with Tkachuk’s $8.2-million cap hit off their books for the next two seasons, they have plenty of space to make a big-league splash.

Tkachuk is a very skilled player who gave a lot to the Senators over his first eight seasons in the NHL. He had also become something of a sideshow in Canada’s capital as he built a larger public profile for himself as a top American star, particularly given the increasing tensions between the two countries. Tkachuk drew the ire of Canadian fans for reasons both within and outside his control after the Americans won Olympic gold earlier this year, with points of contention including his coziness with U.S. President Donald Trump and his depiction in a controversial AI-generated TikTok video shared by the White House that shared negative sentiments about Canadians. As Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman put it on Sunday, “the debate around Tkachuk’s future was a never-ending annoyance in the market and in the dressing room.” Ultimately, while fans in Florida will assuredly welcome Tkachuk with open arms, some fans in Ottawa won’t be nearly as upset to see him go.

Both the Senators and Tkachuk repeatedly denied that they had discussed a trade in the weeks, months, and years leading up to Sunday’s move, but in a certain sense, it always felt inevitable. After all, it hasn’t even been half a decade since Matthew Tkachuk forced his way from the Calgary Flames to the Panthers, and Brady has watched his older brother make three Stanley Cup Final appearances in the last four years. Meanwhile, the Senators have lost in the first round in back-to-back seasons, serving as little more than an appetizer for the Carolina Hurricanes as they went down in four games this past spring. Tkachuk’s output in that sweep? Zero goals, zero assists.

It’s never ideal for a team to lose one of its top players, even worse when it’s their captain, but the Senators are nicely positioned to pivot from this. With the UFA market looking as weak as it’s ever been, it’s truly open season for blockbuster trades. In the wake of Sunday’s deal, The Fourth Period insider David Pagnotta reported that the Senators are already making a strong push for Dallas Stars RFA Jason Robertson, who scored 45 goals and 96 points in 82 games this past season. Another realistic target for Ottawa could be St. Louis Blues forward Jordan Kyrou, whose name has been involved in trade rumors for years.

There’s a really interesting roadmap for the Senators to follow in the coming weeks. If they can find a way to keep the No. 9 pick and use it to add a top prospect to their organization, while also flipping some of the other picks they just received to add a different forward whose trade value is more closely aligned with his on-ice results, they might stand a legitimate chance of coming out ahead from this whole ordeal. But if that next move doesn’t materialize for the Sens, it’s fair to wonder how Tkachuk’s departure might affect the mindsets of young stars Tim Stützle and Jake Sanderson, both of whom are signed long-term but who might be emboldened to follow their now-former captain’s lead if things don’t improve in Ottawa.

Ottawa got a great package of assets for Tkachuk. Staios has given himself the ammunition he needs to retool his club for the immediate and distant futures. But this was the easy part; his grade also reflects a degree of uncertainty that he’ll be able to complete the much more difficult task of acquiring a new star to play in the National Capital Region.

Grade: B+

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