The Latest Misunderstood Scorer: Matvei Michkov.
Goal scorers tend to get a bad rap.
With a few exceptions, they’re described as players who fail to “drive play” at even strength. The stereotype didn’t originate nowhere. That, I will grant you. And sometimes, the stereotype prevails despite the fact that you’re talking about an all-world talent.
Ilya Kovalchuk was one of the more dominant goal-scorers ever… until he wasn’t. How did he fall off so precipitously? It was because he was the living embodiment of the stereotype.
He was a player who genuinely relied on his elite shooting ability.
Once that elite shooting ability faded with age, his ability to make an impact at the NHL level faded along with him. Interestingly, somewhere along the line, Ilya Kovalchuk became a stereotype for goal scorers.
This stereotype simultaneously became a bar to live up to. It was used as a derogatory cudgel against the elite goal scorers of the modern day, but it was simultaneously used to lionize and exalt certain prospects over others.
Take, for example, Auston Matthews and Patrik Laine.
The interesting part about the Matthews vs. Laine debate back in 2016 was that it largely presupposed that Laine was the superior goal-scoring prospect. Some would argue for Matthews on the basis that he was a big center, but nobody correctly labeled Matthews as the future goal-scoring king of the NHL.
What happened? Did he take some anomalous developmental path to goal-scoring supremacy? Was the evidence for his eventual (and, really, immediate) reign not present in his profile as a prospect? On the contrary, it was written all over his profile.
To make my point, here’s a top-line comparison between Matthews and Laine for the major events in their respective draft seasons:
- Auston Matthews scored 24 goals and racked up 22 assists for 46 points in 36 games for the ZSC Lions in the top Swiss pro league.
- During the World Juniors of that season, he scored 7 goals in 7 games.
- During the World Championships of that same season, he scored 6 goals in 10 games.
- Patrik Laine scored 17 goals in 46 games for Tappara of LIIGA, the top Finnish pro league during his draft year.
- During the World Juniors of that season, he scored 7 goals in 7 games.
- During the World Championships of that season, he scored 7 goals in 10 games.
There’s no statistical separation in their goal-scoring profiles when you consider international play. When you consider their play for their respective clubs, it’s a pretty obvious advantage in favor of Matthews.
Their goal-scoring prowess was either even or advantage Matthews. But it didn’t look like that was the case in their draft year. Why? Because Laine looked like a superior goal scorer because he was blessed with a shot that looked as if it was produced with an M16 instead of a hockey stick.
Nobody would look at Patrik Laine rushing down the wing and firing a puck at 250 miles an hour through the goalie’s glove, then say he was inferior to Auston Matthews… a man who primarily scored via netfront brouhahas… at the art of scoring goals.
This principle actually works in reverse as well.
When you become the king of scoring goals in the NHL, the way people view you as a player begins to shift… even if you didn’t change your style at all.
Auston Matthews, to many people nowadays, is regarded as some wrist-shot merchant who is completely irrelevant for massive swaths of game time until he randomly ends your life with a shot that resembles a Zeus thunderbolt.
He isn’t a play-driver. He just floats around until it’s time to score a goal and then promptly stops playing hockey. That’s the argument from a… shocking amount of detractors.
But that isn’t backed up by statistics or film. In fact, the reason Matthews is the king of scoring goals isn’t because his shooting prowess is leaps and bounds ahead of the NHL. Of course, he’s an elite finisher.
But he isn’t leaps and bounds better than Laine at shooting the puck.
You know what he does that’s leaps and bounds ahead of the NHL? Generate chances for himself.
He generates chances for himself at such a laughably high rate that his overall impact on the Maple Leafs’ offense from a “play-driving” perspective is at the 100th percentile of the NHL with Connor McDavid, who I believe is a “play-driver.”
As it turns out, Matthews… by any standard definition… is pretty good at the play-driving thing. After all, what is “EV Offense” really measuring?
It’s measuring the positive (or negative) impact you have on your team’s expected goal generation. Does your team generate more offense… as measured by expected goals… when you’re on the ice than when you’re off? If so, how much? And then we express that differential in the form of a percentile among NHL forwards.
If you positively impact the number of offensive chances generated for your team… you are driving play.
But people rarely accuse Matthews of being a play-driver because he doesn’t play a style that looks like he’s driving play and because he’s a goal scorer.
Like I said at the beginning, there’s been a lot of myth-making about goal scoring. They’re all type-cast as Ilya Kovalchuk.
And that leads us to… Matvei Michkov.
Somewhere along the line, it became an accepted narrative that Michkov doesn’t drive play. But is that narrative buttressed by the truth? Or is he just the latest victim of this insidious movement to slander goal scorers as the enemy of play-driving?
Unfortunately, we do not have publicly available statistics such as “offensive WAR” in an RAPM model or even a publicly available expected goal share that we can compare to Michkov’s teammates.
In order to perform this analysis, then, we are going to need to use some more prehistoric stats. But I would contend that the statistics I’m about to layout send a very clear signal all the same.
First, we can approximate Michkov’s impact on Sochi with a stat as simple as plus-minus.
In 47 games with the team in the 23-24 season, Michkov was a -6 for Sochi.
That almost sounds like a middling to poor result until you consider what Sochi generally does without Michkov. To best approximate that, we’re going to turn to his primary linemate.
In 63 games with the team in the 23-24 season, Tyanulin was a -21 for Sochi.
In other words, in the 16 games that Tyanulin played without Matvei Michkov attached to his hip, he was a -15.
Extrapolating his results to a 63-game season, Matvei Michkov would have been a -8.
If Tyanulin had played 63 games without Michkov at that pace, he would have ended up a -59.
How’s that for playdriving? See, I can’t know what Michkov’s relative expected goal share is. But using these results, I can approximate that it was pretty damn good.
Which is weird given the narrative that he’s a poor even strength player. Even fans of Michkov suggest that he’ll struggle at even strength in the NHL. But that’s actually just bizarre because he’s coming off of what can only be described as historic even-strength dominance relative to his environment.
Okay, maybe that was just 1 season, right? Let’s broaden the scope some.
- In the 27 games Michkov played with Sochi over his draft year, he was a +1.
- In 55 games over that same season, Tyanulin was a -12.
In the 28 games Tyanulin played without Michkov, he was a -13.
If you extrapolate both results to a 63-game season, you will get a -29 for Tyanulin and a +2 for Michkov.
That’s a positive impact of 31 goals over 63 games. Now combine those results with the 23-24 season we just went over, and you have a positive impact of 51 goals over an additional 63 games.
All told, that’s a positive impact of 82 goals over 128 games.
But +/- is an exceptionally noisy stat, so I figure it would be useful if we continued making these comparisons going even further back in Michkov’s career and looking at his MHL days.
To do this, I needed a point of comparison. I could find none better than Ivan Demidov. Demidov is another top prospect and another Russian superstar in the making. Even better? He also played for the SKA organization, so they were both on loaded teams! Better still? He’s regarded as more of a 200-foot player than Michkov, so I would venture to guess that he actually returned better results when it comes to producing a goal differential.
Given his motor and the fact that he makes some plays in the defensive zone by tracked micro-stats, plus his elite playmaking skills… Demidov is regarded as a true play-driver!
Here are the results for both players during their draft-2 and draft-1 seasons.
Michkov:
- D-2: +26 in 50GP
- D-1: +28 in 19GP
Demidov:
- D-2: -5 in 25GP
- D-1: +29 in 47GP
Well, if play-driving is what I think it is… I think Michkov is pretty good at it!
I think you’ve noticed something by now. I’ve proven to you… I think beyond any reasonable doubt… that Michkov has had a tremendous even-strength impact on his teams for much of his career. Including in the KHL.
But I haven’t proven how he’s done it. How can you know that he isn’t Ilya Kovalchuk who happens to be a generational finisher while not actually possessing the puck all that much? Maybe he actually will have a lot to learn as it relates to playing at 5v5 in the NHL.
Like I said, I don’t have his expected goal share on hand for you. But here’s what I do have… his shots per game totals!
Matvei Michkov produced 4 shots on goal per game in the 23-24 KHL season… that was 2nd in the entire league. He played well over 4 minutes LESS per game than Reid Boucher who produced 4.2 shots per game.
He finished those shots at a 9.9% clip. That sounds underwhelming relative to the NHL, but it was actually on-par with the conversion rates of the league’s other volume shooters besides Boucher’s 16.5% which was downright bizarre given his volume and likely not repeatable. It’s hard to score in the KHL, folks. Especially when you’re playing on Sochi without the benefit of fully functional lungs.
You don’t get 4 shots a game by struggling to create at even strength. Clearly, he’s not Ilya Kovalchuk, who’s riding by with 1 of 1 finishing ability.
But I haven’t actually proven that Michkov was getting inside with regularity. Fortunately, those tracked micro-stats I off-handedly mentioned earlier can aid us in finding out if that’s true.
While we can visit the rest of the results, the one I want you to focus on is the two bars at the very top in both graphs. Those are his individual expected goals and his shot attempts. Both are expressed as deviations from the average player.
In both cases, his individual expected goal generation was farther departed from the average player than his shot attempt generation was.
In other words, he was getting inside at a downright exceptional rate.
There are some specific numbers we can put to this!
In the 47 games he played, Matvei Michkov produced 17 expected goals with his own shots. Extrapolated out over a full season, he would have finished with 25 expected goals. As I explained in a follow-up tweet all that time ago, rounding up felt like the least I could do, given the pneumonia!
That would be 2nd in the entire KHL… exactly on par with his shot generation. But that’s actually understating what he did.
Reid Boucher played 21:28 per game over 64 games and produced 31 expected goals.
That comes out to 1.38 expected goals generated per hour of ice time.
Michkov played 16:58 per game over 47 games and produced 17 expected goals.
That comes out to 2.04 expected goals per hour.
By the way, for ease of calculation, I rounded up Michkov’s minutes to 17 and rounded Boucher’s down to 21. In other words? I’m understating the gap.
Now, in the spirit of fairness, you might say that Boucher’s minutes almost surely include the penalty kill and would, therefore, sink his averages.
I’d concede that to you, but point out that Boucher’s minutes include the first power-play unit, whereas Michkov played largely on PP2 with “Volkov.”
Not to mention the differences in the respective strengths of their team.
Have I proved my point yet? Matvei Michkov is not some even-strength liability who just happens to score some goals out of nowhere. That is a false narrative that gets promulgated about every goal scorer that people are too lazy to actually watch or research but want to minimize.
It’s happening to Matthews.
Now, it’s happening to Michkov.
It was wrong then, and I’m more than willing to bet it’s wrong again.
Michkov is a ruthless machine. A prodigy in the truest sense of the term. A supercomputer programmed to generate offense at levels rarely seen in the sport. This narrative that he’s going to struggle at even strength which is propagated even by some in the Flyers organization? It isn’t supported by evidence. It is not buttressed by data.
He has dominated even strength play at every level he’s played at. Don’t be surprised when he adds the NHL to that list as soon as next season.
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