The Toronto Maple Leafs made their move in goal when free agency opened earlier this month, landing Sergei Bobrovsky on a three-year contract. And if you ask Matthew Tkachuk, they didn’t just add a goalie - they added the kind of player who can hold everything together.
On a recent episode of Wingmen with Matthew and Brady Tkachuk, the former Panthers teammate didn’t hold back when talking about Bobrovsky and what he meant to that Florida group.
“The backbone,’’ Tkachuk said of his teammate Bobrovsky. “Obviously, all of our lives have changed forever since the Cups.
Our lives would have been the exact same, we wouldn’t have won without him. He was the guy, the guy you relied on, the guy that if you were playing bad, you knew he would be great.
He kept us in so many games that we didn’t deserve to be in, and he won us a lot of games that we didn’t deserve to win. Just an outstanding teammate.
I’m going to miss him a ton.”
That kind of praise fits the role Bobrovsky played for the Panthers during their back-to-back Stanley Cup run. He was viewed as a major reason at least one of those titles ended up in South Florida, and his 2025 playoff work backed that up with a .914 save percentage. At times, he flat-out took over series, including against the Leafs.
Now Toronto is betting he can bring that same steadying force to a team that expects far more than what it got in the 2025-26 season. For the Leafs, the hope is simple: Bobrovsky doesn’t need to be perfect. He just needs to be healthy, consistent and a clear upgrade over Anthony Stolarz in tandem duty.
There is, of course, some risk baked into the deal. Bobrovsky posted an .877 save percentage last season while playing behind a Panthers team that was hit hard by injuries and never came close to its championship standard. The context matters, but so does the number, especially with Bobrovsky nearing 40.
Even so, Toronto committed three years and $21 million to him, banking on the idea that the version of Bobrovsky they saw at his best is still in there. If he gets back to being that “backbone,” the Leafs’ season could look very different.
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