The boos were always coming. Brady Tkachuk told Ottawa he was staying, then engineered his way to Florida, so a building full of jilted fans chanting "traitor" and "we don't need you" every time he touched the puck was the going rate. That much was expected and priced in.
The part that actually matters happened after the horn, behind a closed door. The Senators beat the Panthers 5-1 in Tkachuk's first game back at Canadian Tire Centre, then blasted "Mr. Brightside" on a loop in their dressing room, loud enough to bleed into Florida's postgame media scrums. Nobody leaves a speaker running like that by accident.
And it's a loaded pick. That song belonged to Tkachuk in Ottawa. It was his three-star song, the one that played when he was named a star of the game, the one he sang shirtless at karaoke the weekend of his wedding, the one he belted out at a pub with a teammate. It followed him around that city for eight seasons, five of them as captain. His old team putting it on repeat the night they beat him is the players walking over and tapping him on the shoulder to say they remember exactly whose anthem it was, and they're keeping it.
RatingOne song alone doesn't prove the room turned on him; it could just be a group of guys enjoying a big win. A single playlist is thin evidence. But it isn't alone.
For months, multiple hockey insiders have reported, independently of each other, that the Ottawa room had curdled on Tkachuk well before the trade. One strand of reporting says his podcast grated on teammates tired of the noise. Another says he spent years telling the guys in that room he had no intention of re-signing, all while wearing the C. Another says the push to move him was coming partly from inside the locker room itself. None of that is an on-record confession from Tkachuk or a named teammate. But three separate reporters landing on the same core story isn't nothing, and it's the backdrop against which you have to read a bunch of professional athletes choosing his personal anthem as their victory music.
Stack it up, and the song reads like a release valve. These are the players who sat next to him, listened to the podcast, and heard him say for years he wasn't staying while he kept the captaincy. When they cranked his song, they were answering their own crowd. "We don't need you," from the stands. "We don't need you," from the stereo.
Tkachuk, for his part, got the one thing he could have wanted out of the night: a goal on Florida's first shot, on the power play, set up by his brother Matthew. Then he took a roughing minor in the final two minutes that ended his evening. Even his best moment came with a reminder that the building wanted to swallow him whole.
The only thing that put a dent in Ottawa's night came at their own end, when Linus Ullmark had to be helped off in the third period and didn't return with a lower-body injury. His status is unclear, and it's the one real worry from an otherwise lopsided night.
People want to credit the fans for this night. Give it to the players instead. The crowd did the loud, obvious thing. The room did the surgical one. They decided a 5-1 win wasn't finished until they'd handed Brady Tkachuk his own song and told him, in the pettiest possible way, that they're glad he's gone.
