June 25, 2024
Christopher Hanewinckel/USA Today Sports
Matvei Michkov was the seventh-overall pick in the 2023 NHL Draft. Now he's the future of the Flyers franchise.
It’s been 17,927 days since the Flyers last won the Stanley Cup.
In that 49-year wait, rivals have reached the pinnacle of the sport and even a place called “Sunrise, Florida” that doesn’t sound like a real locale became the center of the hockey world.
On Monday evening, the Florida Panthers hoisted Lord Stanley, finishing out another season of the Flyers’ championship drought. Making matters even worse for Philadelphia, Sergei Bobrovsky was in net for the Panthers. The Flyers have been essentially cursed at goalie for nearly three decades. Naturally, the Flyers traded away a 23-year-old Bobrovsky in 2012, watched him from afar blossom into a two-time Vezina Trophy-winning goalie. He allowed just a single goal in Florida’s Game 7 win.
The Flyers parted with him so that everyone could full-go endure the infuriating Ilya Bryzgalov era. It was one of many moves that sank the state of hockey in Philadelphia.
That’s simply how things play out for this organization!
The Flyers’ downfall since they last reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 2010 has brought complete apathy for the franchise in this city, something unthinkable from their 1970s heyday through the early 2000s. It’s been a wasteland!
Hope, eternally free and sweeter than a Wawa iced tea, is on the way though.
Prized Russian prospect Matvei Michkov, the seventh-pick in the 2023 NHL Draft, is joining the Flyers this upcoming season. The discourse of when Michkov would join the Flyers, or if ever would at all, is out the window.
The Flyers have one of the most exciting young players in the sport? In the 2020s? Is that allowed? His style as a hot-shot, goal-scoring playmaker feels antithetical to the way the Flyers have long built their roster, too. Michkov is a refresher on so many levels.
Matvei Michkov scores a Michigan-style goal in the KHL pic.twitter.com/MWfyDaGI7n
— Coots (@YaBoyCoots) June 29, 2023
The Flyers are in the purgatory that the Sixers once inhabited in the post-Allen Iverson, pre-Process era. Everyone is just starved for an elite talent to wrap themselves around and long for better days. Michkov’s impending arrival is that shift.
Is Michkov the second coming of Jaromír Jágr? No, that seems quite unlikely. He is however, a glimmer of hope for a fan base starved for just that. Sometimes, that’s enough. Soak it up and dream of overtime playoff goals while sitting on the beach this summer, Flyers fans.
MORE: Michkov puts Flyers on path to contention
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