One of my worst habits – maybe not in the big-picture, but as a writer on a Flyers website for a decade now – is that I have a lot of thoughts I start writing out that I never get around to really finishing.
And this morning, hours after Daniel Briere’s first draft round as the general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers, I’m thinking about two pieces that never got published on this site. The drafts are lost to the sands of time (or, more accurately, to the SBN editor that I no longer have access to), but I still remember the headlines I wrote up for both of them.
One was on April 30, 2017. The headline was “The Flyers just got the break that changes everything”. The other was on July 18, 2021, four very difficult years later. The headline – and I should stress here that this was a draft headline that, for search optimization reasons, would probably not have been the actual headline – was “Holy f**king s**t, something good actually happened”. (There were fewer asterisks.)
If you can place the dates to the events, you were probably facepalming as you read that paragraph. If not, take a deep breath before you reminisce: the first was the day after the Flyers won the draft lottery to move up from 13th to 2nd in 2017, and the second was the day after the Flyers got a seemingly no-doubt-about-it top-pair defenseman in Ryan Ellis for pretty much nothing of value.
Those were, before Wednesday night, the last two times that the Flyers just seemed in the moment to catch a huge, team-changing break. When something that wasn’t supposed to happen happened. When something that on paper looked like an objectively great thing for this team just fell into their lap in a way no one saw coming. When it looked like the Flyers had stumbled into a move that could meaningfully change their path as a franchise for the better.
So. About that! Obviously, those two events did not meaningfully change the Flyers’ path for the better. Nolan Patrick, drafted right before three guys that became superstars, was an acceptable middle-six center for two years before migraines and concussions effectively ended his NHL career. Ryan Ellis played four games for the Flyers in the fall of 2021, and it appears unlikely that he will ever play an NHL game again even though he’s under contract for four more seasons.
And in that time, and all the time since, and even in the few years before, the list of things that even just in the moment felt like they really went right for the Flyers is painfully, almost laughably short. This team has largely mismanaged its way through the Claude-Giroux-And-Everything-After Era and probably deserves the fate that’s befallen them, but we can admit that once in a while even teams that don’t really deserve it have something go right in a way that the Flyers just haven’t.
So, at the risk of offending whatever hockey deities I pissed off when I started writing in April of 2017 and again in July of 2021:
This is it. This is the thing that needed to happen. This is the break we’ve been waiting for for over a decade.
On its face, this is not as much of a surprise as something like jumping up in the draft lottery, or swinging a great trade out of nowhere. Matvei Michkov was a reasonably common choice for the Flyers in mock drafts from people in the know leading up to the draft, such as this one on Wednesday morning from The Athletic’s Corey Pronman. In context, it was reasonable to expect this to happen.
Except, well … no! No it wasn’t! Michkov is, by basically any account, the fourth-best player in this class at absolute worst, and there’s a pretty good argument to be made that he’s second, only behind the guy who’s widely considered the best draft prospect since Connor McDavid. There is not a statistical parallel for an age-18 player scoring at the level he did last year in the KHL, the second-best pro hockey league in the world. He was the best player at Under-18 Worlds in 2021 as a 16-year-old.
Here are some things said about him in scouting reports: “One of the very best first-year draft eligibles I’ve ever seen from inside the offensive blue line.” “[His] hockey sense and the hand skills to execute allow him to pick apart defenses at any level.” “Michkov creates plays on the ice that we can’t even fathom with the benefit of a bird’s eye view.” “Michkov is the best Russian prospect since Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin back in 2004.” There’s a lot more; you can read about it here.
And the Flyers, who picked seventh overall because last summer they hired a coach that would keep them from bottoming out and the then-general manager thoroughly mismanaged the offseason that followed, following a decade consisting of general mismanagement and incredibly bad luck, just … drafted that guy.
With the seventh pick in the draft.
Now, here’s where we acknowledge the risk, because obviously that guy dropping to seven has some strings attached. Michkov is under contract in the KHL for three more seasons, and he plans to play that contract out. Teams have had issues before waiting out talented Russian players under KHL contract in the past. And that was before Russia started a war that’s created a geopolitical situation that’s put them at odds with a large portion of the world, which could make it even harder for a high-profile player who honestly could become one of the best players in the KHL by age 21 to leave the country in 2026 (or sooner if he tries to). The Flyers need to look no further than the current situation of their own goalie prospect, Ivan Fedotov, to understand how fragile this could be.
That risk, of course, is why he was available – because none of the teams picking ahead of the Flyers (other than maybe Chicago, who probably never even considered Michkov after winning the lottery) had the combination of long-term thinking, front office job security, patience, and risk tolerance that they’d need in order to make that pick. The “waiting three years” part is tough for teams that think they’re on a time crunch, but for teams in a rebuild it should be manageable – it’s relatively rare for prospects to make their debuts within two years of being drafted anyways, so one more for a possible generational talent hardly feels like it should be a dealbreaker. It’s the possibly trivial but definitely non-zero risk that Michkov can’t come over after three years, or maybe even at all, that probably scared away other teams in a rebuild like San Jose, Montreal, and Arizona.
Which is to say that there is tremendous possible downside here. Not getting anything out of a top-10 pick would be brutal.
Yet here’s the thing: there are busts in the back half of the top-10 all the time. Pull up any recent draft and take a look at the guys picked around where Michkov was – let’s say from five to nine, within two picks in either direction. You’re going to get a group of pretty good players on the whole, but most years you’ll find one or two that didn’t pan out with the team that drafted them, or at all. The downside risk of “this player just didn’t develop the way we thought he would” may be less intimidating and less unique than the downside risk of “this player just never was able to play for us”, but the end result of “we didn’t get an impact player” – which really should be the only thing you’re looking for at the end of the day when you’re picking this high – is the same either way.
And that’s a downside risk that we’re pretty familiar with. Again, within the last six years the Flyers moved up in the lottery to get a second overall pick and traded for a No. 1 defenseman, and neither one of them is going to play for this team again. But with due respect to Patrick (a very good prospect who even at the time didn’t look like a transformational talent) and Ellis (who even with his strengths was past his prime when they took him from Nashville), whose acquisitions definitely looked like legitimate needle-movers before they fell apart … neither of them was or is Matvei Michkov. (Who, we should note, seems pretty upbeat about going to Philadelphia and getting there as soon as he realistically can.)
Which is why this one cannot fall apart. It just can’t. We have had so few good things even appear to happen to us in the past decade-plus, the things that appeared to be good didn’t even look that good, and then those things turned out to be disasters after all. This? This is immediately the best thing to happen to the Flyers since at least … 2010ish? when it became clear that Claude Giroux was a franchise-changing superstar. The Flyers have a truly game-breaking talent that they haven’t had since at least peak Giroux, and one who could (if they’re lucky) be even better than Giroux was.
It could fall apart. There’s risk. We’re used to that. But it also can’t. This has to be it. After over a decade of both doing nearly everything wrong and having everything go wrong, something that is so obviously right simply has to be the start of this franchise’s turnaround. Because, to (roughly) quote Captain America …
… I don’t know what I’m going to do if it isn’t.
