How “The Mad Russian” Michkov Can Change A Franchise

“It takes a village. You have to roll four lines. You have to sacrifice.”

Stop me if you’ve heard any of these before about winning the ultimate prize of the NHL. All of them are common refrains. The sentiment has lasted through decades, but as more and more teams win the Stanley Cup, you can begin to see a new pattern emerge.

Nathan MacKinnon. Nikita Kucherov. Sidney Crosby. Patrick Kane. Alex Ovechkin.

Between these five players, they have won 10 Stanley Cups since 2010. Just 5 players have led teams to over 75% of the available Stanley Cups since 2010. No, they didn’t do it alone. Many of them had co-stars who, themselves, were among the best players in the league.

But these four game-breaking forwards prove something. Every single Stanley Cup winner has someone who can change the paradigm of a game on a dime.

Even the Vegas Golden Knights, who seem like an exception at first glance, had players who played at that paradigm-shifting level in the 2023 playoffs. Jack Eichel, for the duration of that playoff run, became a player whose all-around impact was comparable to some of the names on that list.

The Flyers won’t be able to depth and culture their way to a Stanley Cup. They won’t be able to ascend to the highest peak of the sport by loading up on power forwards who aren’t that powerful or two-way guys who only really play one-way: the boring one.

They need a guy who can change a game with their sheer brilliance. For some time, the Flyers have precluded themselves from acquiring this kind of talent. They’re often identified before they ever get drafted. These prodigies are born more frequently than they’re developed. It’s just the reality.

Four of those five names were #1 overall picks. The fifth was a Russian who set a record for point totals at the U18 Worlds in his draft year with a mind-boggling 21 points in 7 games.

Nikita Kucherov may have taken some time to deliver on his promise. But he was not developed by anyone except himself and his untiring commitment to growing the most free and easy base of mechanical skill that the league has ever seen.

But he, too, was born with a prodigal talent level. No development staff on earth can create Nikita Kucherov. He was born. He created himself. Middling for the culture is a great way of missing out on them.

Because we see them so soon. They announce themselves as the exception, the anomaly of skill, so early. Everyone knows to take them very, very high in the draft.

Then the Flyers got lucky.

One of these prodigies happened to be born out of a country whose government was embroiled in a war that revolted the population of North America.

The usual skepticism towards Russian hockey was ramped up to the extreme after Russia invaded Ukraine. They couldn’t help it. They took out their feelings on a child playing hockey. They got to Russia the only way they knew how. By denying that a country of such national pride could produce one of the next generation’s defining talents.

Instead of the top 3 or even the top 5, Matvei Michkov fell to 7. Right into the Flyers’ lap. It was a Christmas miracle in late June.

Understand: this did not represent a sea change in the Flyers’ way of thinking. This didn’t incite a new insight into the sport which they fumble and meander around aimlessly. They are who we thought they were.

Daniel Briere has embarked on a Michael Scott Rebuild, in which shouting, “I DECLARE… REBUILD!” is the extent of their eye to the future.

There will be no elite talent coming to help the Russian prodigy, barring another intervention of God. Their pick this year will be somewhere in the 9-14 range, and I guarantee it will be among the least exciting picks you can make in that range.

They will hopeโ€”pray, reallyโ€”that Matvei Michkov can be the transcendent talent who turns a decent team into a great one.

The crazy thing is… he just might be.

To understand Michkov, it helps to understand the metagame of offense in hockey.

For all of the details that go into it, it’s as simple as you want to get to the middle of the ice in the offensive zone and unleash a shot with time and space enough to pick a corner. When possible, you want to unsettle a goalie’s feet by forcing them to move laterally with passes that precede the shot.

That’s it. Acquire time and space in the slot, and get the goalie moving. Those are the two bedrock principles of playing offense in the sport of hockey. The easiest method through which to score goals.

You want to repeat that process as many times as possible because finishing talent in hockey isn’t that impressive. Elite shooters settle around 15%, which isn’t a particularly high jump from the NHL average finishing rate (among forwards) of 9-10%.

So, to produce offense at an unprecedented level, it’s about unlocking the slot and unsettling the goalie’s feet at an unprecedented level. Everything else falls into place.

Fitting to the nickname bestowed upon him by John Tortorella, Matvei Michkov is something of a mad scientist whose work is geared towards unlocking the slot. He has an endless arsenal of strategies and movements designed to achieve that specific purpose.

And I do mean truly endless, because so far, Matvei has proven that he can continually add new methods to his repertoire.

When he was 15 or 16, playing in Russia’s U16 league or the MHL, he ran roughshod over those leagues as a pure goal scorer. And the way he did it was through a brutal efficiency as a puck carrier.

He would use his hands and his feet to carry the puck past layers of defenders before getting the premium look that he wanted.

It’s a pretty brutish way to go about goal-scoring, but it’s certainly possible when you have the kind of puck skills and edge work that he does. It’s even advisable when you can keep your balance through contact and play something of a power-forward game despite his smallish stature.

Even when you attempt to tackle him, there’s a good chance that he’ll finish his drive and still get a good look at the net.

It was around this age that the mad scientist of hockey offense discovered that there was a way to expand the target area. What if the slot wasn’t simply that space between the circles but expanded underneath the goalline?

Through the ‘Michigan,’ Michkov accomplished exactly that.

It isn’t a gimmick for him. With the game and a championship on the line, Michkov considers that move to be as efficient as a wrist shot from the slot.

What that’s effectively done is expand what defenders have to view as premium real estate for Michkov. They can’t just stop worrying about him when he goes behind the net. They have to go defend him there.

But if they’re defending him behind the net, then that’s one fewer person defending the slot. That’s the key. His pressure on scoring areas is the source of his playmaking.

He’s always a threat to score. His impossible-angle shots are not gimmicks either. And though, in his younger days, he would force them when he didn’t have to, he was building the foundation of a new method to unlock the slot.

The mad scientist was working on a prototype that was reliant on him having elite finishing talent, and… he did.

You have to defend Michkov in those areas. You can’t assume that you’ve won by forcing him to the outside. You have to engage him and pressure him.

Once you do, you’re exposing yourself in two ways. There’s the obvious ability to use his elite puck skills and manipulative mind to dance around you and claim the recently vacated middle ice that he covets.

Or he can simply pass around you and facilitate that same look from the slot for a teammate.

Michkov rose through the ranks and created a name for himself as a goal scorer, but when the competition escalated and he needed to develop new tricks to stay ahead, he became so much more. His playmaking, at this point, may be even more impressive than his goal-scoring. And suddenly, the dilemma of covering Michkov has become even more impossible.

You need to pressure him. You likely need to pressure him with more than one defender because the first guy is probably going to lose a 1 on 1 engagement.

Suddenly, your resources as a defense are stretched thin, and he has the vision to identify the holes in your coverage every single time.

I could pick dozens of clips to make this point, but I chose this one because it shows how high-end his vision is.

Even while watching that clip, it’d be easy to laser in on the first Sochi player attacking the slot. But that’s a hard lane to fit a pass through. He understands that a trailer is coming. He bides his time until the lane opens, then hits the trailing Sochi player with time to walk right into his shot.

Even while Michkov adds layers to his slot-finding game, he never abandons his first models. There’s rarely a move in his arsenal that makes just one appearance.

This is a sequence straight out of his MHL days. He takes the puck off the wall and dances past 3 KHL defenders. This is usually the part where he takes his shot.

But remember the first principles. Where possible? Unsettle the goalie’s feet with lateral movement. So he fakes the shot and turns it into a pass to a player at the doorstep. It doesn’t connect. The pass isn’t perfect.

But if that play connects, it’s a goal. That’s Michkov’s secret. That’s the secret sauce behind any superstar. Behind every franchise-altering talent, there lies one truth. They can’t execute perfectly all of the time.

But they put themselves in this kind of position enough times that all they need to do is execute perfectly occasionally, and they’ll put up numbers that look truly mind-boggling.

These first principles aren’t the level Michkov is currently operating at, though. In reality, these are so thoroughly ingrained into his mind as to be second nature.

The level he’s operating at is less about territory and how to gain it, and more about pressure and how to exploit it. These constant drives into the slot are going to invite defensive pressure. When that pressure comes, it will open space for his teammates to drive the slot into a different lane.

He hasn’t mastered this yet, but the mad scientist has already begun his next experiment. Using this constant pressure, Michkov can collapse the defense and open space to the outside for his teammates to attack the slot through a new lane.

And as the quality of the players on his line increases to NHL levels, they can take that space on the outside and find Michkov as he re-locates to the slot himself.

It won’t take an NHL superstar to make that happen. Many top 6 NHL players can pass the puck to the slot with space.

The hard part is finding that space. But the brilliance of Michkov is that he makes the hard stuff look easy.

At 18, Michkov has mastered concepts that 26-year-old gifted NHL offensive players are still learning. When he, himself, is enjoying the prime of his career? There’s a good chance that he’ll be writing new chapters.

And that’s how a “Mad Russian” can change a franchise. By taking an offense stuck on the walls and jammed into the periphery and surgically attacking the middle of the ice at volumes heretofore inconceivable.

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Mandatory Credit: (HK Sochi)

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