Healthy Alex Tuch ready to move past disappointing regular season

By Justin Emerson

Thursday, July 23, 2020 | 2 a.m.

Alex Tuch was riding high a year ago, and no one could blame him.

He had just completed a tremendous year in the NHL and was about to get a major pay raise with a new contract he had already signed.

Tuch was the present and future of the Vegas Golden Knights.

Then a tumultuous 2019-20 season happened, where injuries and lineup instability dipped his production. He bookended the year out of the lineup hurt, missing 29 of the Golden Knights’ 71 games.

He’s healthy now, which could mean big things for Vegas’ chances in the playoffs. The Golden Knights appear to have locked in his spot in the lineup, and with the postseason beginning next weekend, Tuch is ready to show everyone he’s still the same budding star he looked like a year ago.

“For me the message is if you have a great playoff, no one remembers the regular season,” DeBoer said. “And I think that’s the approach he’s taking.”

Rewind to the end of the 2017-18 campaign, and Tuch’s stock couldn’t be higher coming off a rookie season where he helped the expansion Golden Knights reach the Stanley Cup Final. The team rewarded him with a seven-year, $33.25 million extension set to begin in the summer of 2019.

Coming off a second season with the team where he scored 20 goals to trigger a bonus, it looked like his $4.75 million cap hit was going to be a steal this season.

That notion started to dissipate once the games started. An injury kept him out until Halloween, when he scored in his season debut but then he didn’t find the back of the net for almost a month.

Another injury sidelined him in February, ending Tuch’s season 12 games early and keeping him to just eight goals and 17 points in 42 games.

“It’s definitely a fresh start,” Tuch said of the upcoming postseason. “It’s something I have to leave in the past. It was a building year for me.”

Tuch said he was close to returning when the season paused, but the coronavirus interruption allowed him to take his full time to heal instead of rushing back for the playoffs. He now reports he’s in the best shape of his life after losing 10 pounds during quarantine.

A healthy Tuch is a dangerous weapon. He’s 6-foot-4, 220 pounds but moves with the speed of a figure skater on the ice. He’s physical, but not to the point that he routinely puts himself in dangerous positions. And when he comes streaking down the wing, there’s not much that can stop him from whipping off a snapshot.

And when he was playing top-six minutes in 2018-19 alongside Max Pacioretty and Paul Stastny, he was often the best player on the ice. He even led the team in points at the time of the Mark Stone trade in February.

An unintended consequence of acquiring a player like Stone, though, is that someone is displaced in the lineup. That someone was Tuch, who bumped down a line and saw his average time on ice drop from 17:06 per game before the Stone trade to 15:36 after it. He had 43 points in 55 games before the Stone trade and nine points in 18 games after it.

This year, his primary center was Cody Eakin, who was traded to Winnipeg in February, but he also flanked Tomas Nosek, Cody Glass, Chandler Stephenson, Nicolas Roy and others.

“He’s a big guy and tough, so he can make the plays,” forward and occasional linemate Tomas Nosek said. “He can be difference on the third line, so hopefully he will be great for us and hopefully he will get going and stay healthy.”

For the first time this season, Tuch now has stability, which could be the difference. He knows he’s going to be on the third line with Stephenson and Roy, two fellow speedsters that can wreak havoc on opposing defenses.

The trio has been together all camp and performed well.

“Our third line with injuries and stuff was really a rotating group so he never got comfortable, but with (Stephenson) and Roy right now he has the potential to really make noise in the playoffs,” coach Peter DeBoer said. “He’s a mismatch guy for us in the depth of our lineup. He’s going to be hard for fifth and sixth defensemen to contain.”

Tuch’s regular season wasn’t up to the standards he set for himself. But he’s also aware the circumstances were far from perfect, and he’s determined to not let that hinder him.

He’s getting a fresh start when the postseason begins, and he plans to make the most of it.

“Just going forward I’m just worried about playoffs,” Tuch said. “It doesn’t matter what happened before or how many injuries I had, how many games I played or who I played with or anything like that. I’m just worried about winning now.”