The wait appears to be over — and a lot sooner than initially believed.
A team source confirmed to PHLY Sports on Sunday morning that Matvei Michkov will successfully terminate the remaining two seasons on his contract with KHL club SKA St. Petersburg, with the intention of signing an entry-level contract with the Philadelphia Flyers and joining the club for the 2024-25 season.
Hockey News Hub and The Fourth Period’s Anthony DiMarco were first to report the news.
Michkov, the Flyers’ top prospect and one of the best prospects in all of hockey, was selected by the Flyers with the seventh overall pick in the 2023 draft. In the lead-up to the draft, Michkov was near-universally rated as a top-four talent in an especially strong class, with some evaluators even deeming him to be the second-best prospect in the draft behind only Connor Bedard.
Michkov slipped to the Flyers’ pick at No. 7 for multiple reasons, but largely because of concerns regarding his ability to successfully make the move to North America. The Russia-to-NHL pipeline has been complicated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, which led to Russia being banned from international competitions and the NHL to suspend their “memorandum of understanding” between the NHL and the KHL, which governed player transfers between the two leagues. Michkov also was under contract with SKA St. Petersburg through the 2025-26 season, meaning that the draft-day expectation was that he would not make his NHL debut until 2026-27 — three years down the road. Some NHL teams had no interest in waiting that long.
But Michkov’s talent was never in question — he has star-level potential on the wing and his ceiling remains that of a franchise-changing player.
Michkov spent the 2023-24 season on loan with HK Sochi, scoring 41 points (19 goals and 21 assists) in 47 games in the KHL — Russia’s top tier pro league — at age 19. His 0.872 point-per-game pace was historic for a player in his Draft+1 season. However, it still appeared that the Flyers would have to wait out the length of Michkov’s contract before giving him the opportunity to make the jump to the NHL.
Over the past month, however, SKA St. Petersburg opened the door for an early termination of Michkov’s contract, and negotiations between Michkov’s camp and SKA picked up in earnest. Apparently, those talks proved successful, and now, the expectation on the Flyers’ part is that Michkov will indeed be coming to the NHL next season.
The Flyers will still need to sign Michkov to an NHL entry-level contract, but Michkov’s camp would not have executed on a termination of his KHL contract unless they were confident than an ELC with the Flyers would be forthcoming shortly thereafter.
Expect Matvei Michkov on the Philadelphia Flyers’ roster for Game 1 of the 2024-25 season — a sentence that would have been unthinkable just a few short weeks ago.
