“For me, I just want to talk to Steve and I know we’re going to talk, just to talk about our normal conversations at the end of the year about our team and what he thinks, what he thinks about my own game,” Tkachuk said. “For me, it’s just having those conversations about our team and where we can improve, where I can improve. All that other stuff is just a distraction.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t play good enough. I tried to do everything in my power to get my game going and make an impact. It’s just felt nothing was going, nothing was going in, nothing was going my way. I have to live with that. That’s what’s tough. As a player I believe I could be that guy, and I always pride myself on that. And when it doesn’t happen, it’s a big shot in the confidence.”
On Monday, Staios labeled the talk of Tkachuk playing elsewhere next season as “nonsense.”
“I don’t read it. I don’t bother with it,” Staios said. “We know what we have internally. We have great communication with our players, so we really don’t focus on it. I mean, this comes up very often. There’s nothing that we have talked about or thought about where that conversation should happen.”
Selected by the Senators with the No. 4 pick in the 2018 NHL Draft, Tkachuk was named captain Nov. 5, 2021, at the age of 21 and, according to forward Tim Stutzle, is taking “tremendous steps as a leader.”
“He became a captain very young, and I think that’s hard for anyone, becoming captain in a Canadian market,” Stutzle said. “And I feel like he puts a lot of pressure on himself, like we all do. And I feel like I can relate with him in a lot of ways, that way, and that he wants to win too. He cares.”
