How much his linemates miss him can be quantified.
A corsi event is generated that involves 10 active individuals, 4 of them your teammates. So I consider WOWY far more telling than saying that one line had X amount of CF. You can see that line sorely misses Tkachuk though, even before you read into any statistical sample:
https://i.imgur.com/zBZr1V9.png
Tkachuk without Backlund: 54.6% CF, 40% GF
Backlund without Tkachuk: 44.1% CF, 28.6% GF
Together: 58.0% CF, 64.3% GF
Tkachuk without Frolik: 54.0% CF, 61.5% GF
Frolik without Tkachuk: 49.7% CF, 35.6% GF
Together: 58.2% CF, 56.0% GF
While Tkachuk does enjoy better possession results with his teammates than without, both Frolik and Backlund suffer far more when separated from Tkachuk than Tkachuk does when he’s removed from the influence of those two. And 3M’s scoring just completely falls off a cliff when Matthew isn’t with them, they’re essentially relegated to nothing more than a solid checking line.
The top defence pairing have a similar relationship with Tkachuk (although the influence can be more attributed to 3M as a whole). The moral of the story is to stick Gio and Tkachuk out there together as often as possible... although I guess that's a given, haha.
Tkachuk without Dougie: 55.3% CF, 59.1% GF
Dougie without Tkachuk: 52.4% CF, 40.0% GF
Together: 60.1% CF, 56.2% GF
Tkachuk without Gio: 57.5% CF, 42.9% GF
Gio without Tkachuk: 50.9% CF, 40.0% GF
Together: 57.1% CF, 76.5% GF