What does Matvei Michkov in the NHL look like?
Speculation is swirling that Matvei Michkov, the Torts-dubbed “Mad Russian” could descend upon Philadelphia earlier than expected. SKA’s chairman, Medvedev is publicly floating that possibility in Russian interviews.
For my money, he sounds like a man who genuinely cares about the success and well-being of Matvei as both a player and a person. He’s willing to entertain the idea that the NHL is the next best step for him individually, and that’s really what he cares about. The decision he makes, for his part, will come down to what he believes is best for Matvei.
Matvei Michkov to Philly sooner than expected?
I rather inexplicably killed article material when I published my speculation on these negotiations between Philadelphia and SKA. But suffice it to say, I think a lot of this comes down to role and ice time.
SKA, particularly Medvedev, wants to see Michkov succeed when he goes to the NHL. Hell, Russia wants to see him succeed. The entire nation of Russia wants this as badly as the nation of Canada wanted Connor Bedard to succeed from day 1 in the NHL. To do that, he needs to actually see the ice in a role he’s meant to play.
For Bedard, that meant being instantly granted 1C and PP1 minutes even though he probably wasn’t fully ready for such an undertaking. He certainly wouldn’t play such a hefty role for a contender, and that’s okay. It was good for his development to flood him with repetitions.
SKA wants the same for Michkov, or at least something roughly equivalent. That means they want the Flyers to play him as a top 6 winger on their first power-play unit. And “yeah, sure” isn’t a particularly compelling answer.
I believe that Joel Farabee’s name being floated in talks is to facilitate a hockey trade for a young center.
This kills two birds with one stone. You need a young top-6 center, and you also show SKA just how easy it will be for Michkov to be one of the team’s 2 top right-wingers.
They’ve already pushed Tippett and Foerster to the left. Besides Konecny, the only guy Michkov would be reasonably competing with for ice time is Bobby Brink… and Torts has sent that guy to China on multiple occasions.
Of course, the natural next step is people wondering if Matvei Michkov SHOULD be guaranteed top-6 minutes on the Flyers at such an early age.
Let me start with the short answer: Yes.
And now I’ll proceed with the long answer: Yes, but here’s some tape study featuring his awesomeness to support my position.
First, it’s important to understand where the Flyers are. We aren’t the Avalanche or the Rangers or the Hurricanes. We don’t have an overflow of top-6 forwards who are fighting tooth and nail for every bit of ice time.
We’re not making the case that he should play over Artemi Panarin and Mikko Rantanen. We don’t even have to make the case that he should play over Travis Konecny. The case is that he should play over Garnett Hathaway, and well, that’s true.
As for being guaranteed PP1 minutes? The Flyers are the worst power play for 3 years running. What could Michkov possibly make the power play even if he isn’t awesome… WORSE? Could he make it WORSE? Besides, he isn’t even the first Russian Flyer to be guaranteed power-play minutes for inexplicable reasons.
That title goes to Yegor Zamula. It’s not even as if Matvei Michkov being guaranteed power-play time would be inexplicable. The explanation is pretty self-evident: he’s Matvei freakin’ Michkov.
I should explain what that means, huh?
I’m not going to talk about how many points he scored in the KHL. I’m not going to talk about his NHLe or whatever else. We aren’t talking about how many goals looked NHL translatable or how many assists or anything else.
We’re just going to talk about Michkov in the most clear-cut way possible. What does he do that will be effective in the NHL from day 1? What is the stuff that he puts on tape that led to those points? And why do those particular traits translate to the NHL?
The rush game
The Flyers were one of the NHL’s best teams at generating chances in transition last year, and it seems logical to assume that it’ll be a core part of their identity moving forward. Their rush chances look more like the Vegas Golden Knights than the Colorado Avalanche.
The center doesn’t go end-to-end all that much. The wingers anticipate the play out of the defensive zone and make themselves available to create odd-man opportunities.
That’s the sort of stuff Matvei does to a fault. The system, as I’ve said before, was likely designed for him. But now we’re talking differently. How would he fit within it… right now?
In this regard, I expect the transition to be seamless. As a player on the rush, Matvei Michkov can fill virtually every role.
When one of his linemates is carrying the puck, he times his path to the net flawlessly. He doesn’t rush ahead of the play and go offsides or land at the net too soon and fail to be a viable option like Joel Farabee tends to do. Or Owen Tippett.
He stays perfectly synchronized with his puck carrier. He’s always an option. And as soon as the opposing team dedicates their resources to check the more immediate threats, it’s an easy pass to Michkov. And Michkov proceeds to remind everyone why he used to be a goals > assists player in lower levels.
But that isn’t really where Michkov separates himself. His timing is a bit better than most Flyers forwards, but he’s hardly separating himself when this is his role. It’s when he’s the puck carrier that his lethal skill level becomes most evident.
When Michkov leads the rush, the problems he poses to defenses become… unique. Lots of players can put their heads down and steamroll down the wing and fire one off the goalie’s pads.
The Flyers were a dynamic rush team that also had an abysmally low shooting percentage, and the reason was that their rushes were often telegraphed and easily predicted by both defenses and goalies. The shots they generated were of passable quality at best. The more dangerous looks that a rush can afford were unavailable to them.
This was a problem that Vegas had before Mark Stone, and more so, Jack Eichel. It was their ability to delay at the blue line and find a better play that turned those rushes into lethal opportunities.
Michkov, right now, is already a splendid user of the delay game when he’s leading the rush. He’s a master of tempo.
If the lane for him to attack individually isn’t available, then he won’t force it and just resign himself to a turnover or a low-percentage shot that’s equivalent to a turnover. He’ll pull up and patiently find his trailer.
Certain players are single-minded in their efforts to get behind the defender. Owen Tippett is this way. A younger Nathan MacKinnon was singularly determined to get behind the defense and was therefore unaware of the space that he had right in front of the defender to make a play.
Some players are so keenly aware of the space that defenders leave them that they’re specifically looking to make plays in front of them. Nikita Kucherov and Leon Draisaitl have turned this into an art form. They’ll pull up and they’ll make a play right in front of your face.
The natural reaction to the uninitiated… to people who don’t know better… is to try and pressure them. They’re prepared for that, too. Kucherov and Draisaitl are more than prepared to make sure you’re wrong no matter what you choose. Michkov, too, shows this ability.
If you play him too tightly, he’s explosive on his first step. He can push off of an edge and create separation, not to mention his array of immaculate dangles. Like Kucherov, he has a special fondness for the between-the-legs move before his drives.
It isn’t for style points, either. Everything Michkov does is functional. Putting the puck between his legs like that is a way of protecting it against the probing stick of the defender. The only way you’re going to make a play on the puck while you’re driving by is if you risk tripping him by fishing in his skates. And then you just gave him a penalty.
More often, players just get driven by and they give him a chance at the net.
Off the rush, Michkov has already formed a similar decision tree to Kucherov. A way in which he can always make his defenders wrong. If he makes the right read, then you don’t get to play defense.
His lack of NHL experience will limit him. Sometimes, he’ll make the wrong read. He’ll do that more often than he will as he gains years of reps. Given how fast he learns, maybe the real timeframe is months. But still, it isn’t foolproof.
Sometimes, he does this.
I’m not entirely sure what he was doing there. I’ve seen him hit that trailer off of the pull-up countless times, but he decided that he should fake the pull-up and attempt to spin-off of his defender.
It’s creative as hell and very entertaining. But he got too big for his britches, and I suspect he’ll have his fair share of such plays in the NHL.
But it’s difficult to fault him for not operating perfectly within an established system that is already more advanced than all but the most lethal superstars.
Suffice it to say, Michkov will be the Flyers’ most cerebral and effective rush operator from day 1. He won’t be perfect. He’ll sometimes make the wrong reads within his established system.
But the system that he operates under is the same one as the best players in this league. He’s just getting more reps under the same thought process.
The cycle
The cycle game isn’t all that complicated. You cycle the puck around the outside until one of your players finds a window of space to attack the middle of the ice. That attack will open up cracks in the opposing defense, and from those cracks, quality scoring opportunities will emerge.
It isn’t much different from a pick-and-roll in basketball. It’s a simple play that’s designed to engineer an advantage by breaking open defensive shells and forcing overplays or downright errors.
Like the pick and roll, the cycle game is defined by its players’ ability to create those advantages. Matvei Michkov has turned attacking the inside of defensive structures into a mad science befitting his “Mad Russian” moniker.
His elusiveness in tight spaces is complimented by his near-instantaneous processing of the ice. He can get pucks to the inside with a simple pass under pressure. NHLers given that premium of an opportunity, rolling downhill with room in the middle, probably convert that into a grade-A chance. Even the ones you wouldn’t think of as star players.
But he can also beat pressure on the boards with sheer elusiveness along the boards.
He’s almost pinned twice there, but he outmaneuvers his check twice then gets himself to the high F3 spot in a 3-2 offensive zone formation. Like William Nylander has become famous for, he’ll use that high perch as a platform to beat his man and get rolling downhill into a high-quality scoring chance.
His pristine edgework makes him a constant threat to simply cut on a dime and threaten the middle at the expense of some poor defensive player’s ankles.
He can quickly enter a puck-protecting posture that separates him. He has elite reactivity that begins from the moment he touches the puck.
Protection is his ultimate priority. Dangles will never come at the expense of possession. If he starts dangling? That’s when he knows he has you. But primarily, Michkov looks to establish possession. He understands that his agility and balance are his greatest assets. His ability to control the puck under pressure is a separator. He uses those tools to make plays through pressure.
You can try to shove him or hit him, but you have to deal with his outlier ability to absorb contact. He’ll even take on what I refer to as “The Draisaitl Posture,” and just ignore all the hitting and shoving while he feathers a pass to an activating defenseman and murders your structure.
York and Drysdale are about to look significantly more dangerous. He does this shit with “Volkov,” whose name is so offensive to those who watch him play that he may as well be named “Voldemort.”
The Flyers talked about generating more in-zone offense but keeping it in-house. Michkov’s arrival may well be the key to those ambitions.
The forecheck
This might be the most underappreciated of the contributions I expect Michkov to make. Compared to his ruthless efficiency off of the rush or his downhill violence in the cycle game, this sure as hell won’t make headlines.
And he won’t be the second coming of Valeri Nichuskin. He won’t even be Juraj Slafkovsky in this area, who seemed to explode in the latter half of this past season as he began to leverage his outlier length and power on the forecheck.
But Michkov will be a real asset on the forecheck all the same. Once again, it’s his mind that rules the day. Through angling and stick positioning, he quickly removes easy decisions from his mark.
When you force someone to make a harder play under a compressed timeframe, they’re more likely to screw it up. And when they do? Michkov is there. And goals usually ensue.
He can cause havoc as the F1, then detach at the perfect time to become an outlet to a teammate who is recovering the loose puck. And once he has the puck, he already knows what he’s going to do with it. And when he has the puck in the offensive zone… goals tend to ensue.
His raw skill level means, that even when you think you’ve established a position against him, you haven’t. He’ll just reach around you and steal the puck away without even touching you, much less committing a stick infraction.
Despite the rumors, he’s never afraid to add some good old-fashioned hustle to the equation. But he doesn’t churn his legs mindlessly, mostly because he’s never done something mindlessly in his life.
When he’s going pell-mell to beat out an icing, he’s also forcing inside position on his mark because he understands the value of simply being first to touch the puck.
That last line sounds like it’s flowery and effusive praise, doesn’t it? He’s never done anything mindless in his life. I suppose it is, but I also think it’s a description of his character. Michkov will suck the air out of any locker room he enters.
The way in which the team plays hockey will be indelibly colored by the way he wants to play. He’ll hold everyone to that standard he sets, too. His teammates in Sochi have talked about it. If you take a route he doesn’t like, he’s going to correct you on it. If you so much as occupy a position he finds irregular, he’s going to correct you on it.
He has high expectations of his teammates regardless of who they are. Even Sochi, professional losers in the KHL, were held to the standard of playing Michkov’s hockey.
But it isn’t accountability for thee and none for me with him. He’s a perfectionist, and his expectations for himself dwarf what he expects of his teammates.
He’s not unlike Nathan MacKinnon this way. MacKinnon defines the Avalanche. His gifts and his personality have transformed the team. And their front office has leaned into that. Everything the Avalanche are is an extension of who MacKinnon is.
Frankly, I prefer a team this way. I think the Maple Leafs are a walking identity crisis who are afraid to say we are Auston Matthews.
We are clever. We are smart. We make complex plays freely up and down the lineup. We value body positioning over violence. We’re not “hard to play against,” but we’re damn annoying and we’re always in the fight.
But the Leafs don’t say that. The Leafs acquired Joel Edmundson and Ryan Reaves because Auston Matthews needs some snarl on his hockey team.
But it’s a lot to be willing to call your hockey team an extension of a single player.
Fortunately for the Flyers… it’s exactly what they were looking for as they attempt to make the “New Era of Orange,” well… new.
Mandatory Credit: Christopher Hanewinckel - USA TODAY Sports
Read More
Pittsburgh fans chanting “F*ck the Flyers” at the NFL Draft while down 3-0 in the series is peak desperation
A “Fuck the Flyers” chant broke out in Pittsburgh ahead…
WATCH: Penguins poked the bear and the Flyers made them pay for it
Wednesday night at Xfinity Mobile Arena was everything the Penguins-Flyers…
Flyers take 3-0 series lead and the Penguins are officially dead men walking
Playoff hockey returned to Philadelphia on Wednesday night and the…
Comments (0)