Matvei Michkov Is Hockey’s First Grandmaster
MATVEI MICHKOV – At the median levels of sport, fundamentals rule the day. Coaches and athletes at the average level will learn a lot of things that are generally good, and these things will become the fundamental basis of how they understand hockey.
Boxers will learn to keep their hands up to protect their chin. Baseball players will learn to choke up on the bat and take a contact-above-all approach, or to never swing when the count is 3 balls and 0 strikes. Quarterbacks in football will be instructed to never throw across the field when they’re base isn’t set, or maybe at all.
A lot of these cardinal rules will serve a lot of players well. They got to be cliches for a reason, after all. They work most of the time for most people. However, the true mark of excellence in any of these competitive endeavors is the ability to discard fundamentals at the correct time. The level that the best players in the world play at is one where the only fundamental is winning. Everything else is subject to change.
Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor will strike with their hands at their waist. It works because they’re such gifted evaders. They’re quick and able to slip or move away from the opposition’s strikes. But that isn’t why they do it.
They continue to do it because they can, yes. But they choose to do it because it provides them advantages. On one level, they’re relaxed in the ring or octagon in ways that their contemporaries never are. Fighting with your hands at your sides is relaxing. It feels natural because it’s so similar to how you’d pose yourself if you were just walking around. That ultimate relaxation allows them to see things that other fighters miss.
It’s deceptive, too. Punches from that position are harder to read. The subtle cues are suddenly very different.
They break fundamental rules in order to seize an advantage. And you don’t stop them. As their coach, it’s critical to realize when you’re dealing with a prodigy who breaks all of the rules.
Matvei Michkov is a prodigy who will break any rule you’ve ever created if it means he seizes an advantage.
Fitting of his legendary hockey sense, the way Matvei Michkov understands hockey isn’t most akin to the way Mayweather sees boxing. It’s actually most akin to the way Magnus Carlsen sees chess.
Magnus Carlsen plays chess with unrestrained creativity. He’ll intentionally play unorthodox moves that have rarely been played at the highest level, because he knows his opponent won’t have had the opportunity to research that obscure position. That way, he isn’t playing a computer. He’s playing a person.
Once he’s brought the game to a novel state and he’s playing the man, his style is positional and grinding. He plays for small advantages that can accumulate into massive problems for the opponent.
And then, when he’s reached the endgame, he’s the best player in history at converting those advantageous endgames into victories.
Matvei Michkov is no different. The chess board for Carlsen is the 200×85 sheet of ice for Michkov.
His goal yesterday was an example of this philosophy at work. Michkov scored 2 minutes into the second period, but he created the advantage he’d later convert into that goal far earlier in the game. From his first shift of the game, in fact.
Michkov had been playing a lot of his shifts against Luke Hughes. Luke is a gifted skater and an offensively minded defenseman. He’s looking for any opportunity to create from the blueline and break a winger’s ankles as they try to keep pace with his elite agility.
Matvei Michkov was very aware of this. This is a player who generally sags far off of the defender at the blueline and allows them to take shots from the point, because that shot is essentially a turnover at the level he sees the game.
Against most blueliners, he’s waiting for either him or his teammate to block one of those point shots and to convert that shot into a rush the other way. He’s protecting the net from higher danger opportunities, and he’s setting up the potential for higher danger opportunities himself.
That strategy is less than ideal against someone like Luke Hughes. Instead, he pressures Hughes early. He’s on him as soon as he touches the puck. Why? Because Hughes’ first instincts is to use his skating and deception to beat a winger who challenges him. But Michkov isn’t giving the space to do any of that.
He’s shutting down the skating lanes. He forced two or three turnovers from Luke Hughes in the first period. This was him seizing his advantage in the opening and creating a favorable environment in the middle game.
He conditioned Hughes to think fast. He better make a play quickly. There’s no time to set up a sequence where he dances around the winger.
Luke Hughes has been thoroughly conditioned that he has to make a play fast. The pressure is coming. He’s a quarterback playing a hot route. Now, the “hot route” for most defensemen in this situation is a banal dumping of the puck into the corner for his forwards to either forecheck or cycle.
That’s why Matvei Michkov doesn’t default to this strategy. It isn’t creating a massive advantage against most players. Against Luke Hughes, however? He wants to make a play. If he’s getting pressured, he’s going to assume that his partner has more space to create than he does and he’s going to make a D-to-D pass.
He finally sprung Michkov’s trap. Look at how quickly Michkov went from pressuring Hughes to a slight cut into attacking the middle of the ice. He flew the zone immediately after Hughes threw that pass. Watch his eyes. He was able to confirm that pass had been intercepted, as he anticipated. If it hadn’t, he could quickly turn around and not cede a significant advantage.
But it had. Couturier saw the same thing Michkov did. He picked the pass off, and Michkov pushed full steam ahead. Hughes is a faster skater than Michkov is, and at this stage, it’s not particularly close.
He can’t win a race, but this isn’t going to be a race. Hughes has to turn his toecaps to go north ASAP. That’s an advantage for Michkov. If he had stayed straight ahead and tried to create a traditional breakaway? There’s a good chance Hughes could catch him.
So, he crosses the middle of the ice immediately and goes all the way to the other side of the rink. That leaves Luke Hughes in the dust, who would have to turn again.
Like Magnus, Matvei Michkov doesn’t fumble opportunities in the endgame very often. He understands that he forced the goalie to move across his crease, and he likewise understands the opening he just created on the glove side.
Goal. Tie game. It all happened in one 45 second shift, but he had arranged the pieces to create these conditions for several shifts before this.
That’s the level he thinks at. Everyone wanted to clown Luke Hughes for that turnover, but the truth was that he had been setup to do exactly that over the course of ten minutes of shifts against Michkov. He had been conditioned. His pieces had been arranged into a sequence where no win was available.
Matvei Michkov will do whatever he thinks will give him an advantage. That sounds obvious, but that also requires a great deal of coloring outside of the lines. It requires an absolute belief in himself and his reads. He has that, and he has the instincts to be correct far more often than not.
Tortorella wants to pull his hair out over things he does away from the puck at times, but more times than not? Those decisions away from the puck served a purpose. It strengthened his position on the ice, even if it looked unorthodox to Torts.
This is why analytics are important. We need an objective barometer of success. We need to know when someone is breaking the system in order to achieve outstanding results, and when someone is breaking the system in order to be caved in. We need to separate the geniuses from the guys who really need to play structured hockey.
Matvei Michkov’s results are downright terrifying for the rest of the NHL. He has played this season as a 19/20-year-old, and he has a 57% expected goal share at 5v5 across the full season. The most effective Flyers forward, and it actually isn’t all that close. He creates chances at an ungodly rate, and he doesn’t give all that much back.
Most frightening of all is that he’s improving. His play is becoming more and more suffocating as he makes corrections to his thought process. Michkov is self-developing. He learns from his own mistakes on his own terms.
Since December 1st, Michkov ranks 2nd among forwards in the NHL (with over 250 minutes) in expected goal share at 5 on 5.
He has a 64.5% expected goal share. He’s creating 3.4 expected goals per hour of 5v5 play.
He’s behind only Zach Hyman, whose 5 on 5 minutes come almost exclusively alongside Connor McDavid. And I don’t mean that to disparage him, actually. Hyman achieves these results because of his many gifts, some of which align with Michkov’s.
Hyman is a genius at finding prime shooting real estate. He’s a monster at taking pucks off of the wall, and he’s a net front demon.
Matvei Michkov is all of these things. Much of that is the heart of Michkov’s game, too. But he’s been able to do this with a carousel of linemates over that time. Why? Because Michkov adds another layer. He’s one of the best passers in the world right now. His touch is freakish.
His skill and his unique feel for the puck is ultimately just a tool, though. It’s some of his most important pieces on the board, but ultimately, his defining trait is the way he can leverage his gifts by playing chess on the ice.
It’s fitting that while everyone talks about Matvei Michkov’s conditioning and skating, he has shared a much different problem with adjusting to the NHL.
He didn’t care to mention the physical toll of all of these games. In fact, the Flyers misinterpreted the quote to say that he needs a dietician.
His physicality will make the game simpler for him as time goes on, but the heart of the issue… the reason Michkov cares so much about his mental energies… is because he’s playing chess on ice.
And going to the NHL is like he just climbed 500 ELO in a day while switching from the classical variation to the blitz variation. He used to have ninety minutes to make all of his moves, and now he has 5.
That’s what he means. Everything happens so much faster. He needs to do all of the same calculations he was doing before, but now he needs to do it in a massively compressed window of time.
Matvei Michkov is a prodigy. He can do that. But doing that is exhausting. It’s not physically exhausting. It’s mentally exhausting. And it creates a situation where, if the exhaustion wins, then he starts making uncharacteristically poor reads.
One reason Magnus Carlsen can do this to people in chess is that he simply has more mental stamina than his contemporaries. He lasts at peak mental powers for longer. And the other guy breaks first.
When Magnus played Ian Nepomniachtchi, a Russian chess grand master, one of the games dragged onto a point to where Stockfish–the world’s most powerful chess engine–calculated that a win for either side was actually impossible.
Assuming both sides played correct chess, neither could win the game any longer. But Magnus didn’t offer a draw. He played on. And on. So did Ian.
The game stretched to something like 125 moves when Ian finally broke. He made a catastrophic error that would allow Magnus to convert the stalemated endgame into a win, and he resigned when mate became the only outcome within a few moves.
Magnus didn’t find some brilliant move that changed the game. Ian and he were dead-even in the game. It was just about perfect chess from both sides. Ian’s mind finally gave out, and he stopped playing perfect chess. He lost a game he should have drawn.
Most NHL players don’t have the mental stamina to play chess on the ice. They just don’t. They can’t process information that quickly. Players like Nikita Kucherov needed time to reach this level where he was mentally perfect.
Michkov has achieved this level as a child. A true prodigy. But there’s still no substitute for experience. Mental stamina is built as well as gifted. Michkov is taxing his brain in an unprecedented way, and because of that, he runs into the problem of mental exhaustion.
Simply being a better athlete would allow him to reserve this mental energy, so where he isn’t playing chess with dire physical consequences on every shift. And that will come with time. His athletic ability, something that will develop, is an obstacle.
But he’s been overcoming this obstacle with unprecedented mental abilities. Those mental abilities have a cost.
Because of this unique situation, I would understand if Michkov’s coach had a unique solution to the conundrum of his ice time. Some games, he’s operating at peak mental efficiency. Some games, he isn’t.
When Michkov is at the peak of his powers mentally, he should be getting waterboarded with ice time. Twenty minutes a night at a bare minimum. In those games, you should take advantage of him being your best player. Because he is your best player when he has the mental energy he needs.
When he doesn’t, I would understand pulling back on the reigns. When he’s making mistakes that he doesn’t usually make, when he’s run into a wall because he’s had to process too much at once, then Tortorella should do his usual business of playing him 12 minutes, or maybe even less.
Instead, what happens is Michkov is played sparingly on every night. Even during his peaks. It’s ridiculous, and it’s because Tortorella doesn’t really understand what’s happening here.
Instead, he’s attempting to teach a young Magnus Carlsen how to play chess “the right way.”
Without realizing that the right way is most often what Matvei Michkov calculates in the first place.
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