VOORHEES, N.J. — Rick Tocchet, for a couple of reasons, isn’t too fixated on Matvei Michkov’s ice time just three games into the season.
His club has been in the penalty box way too often. The Flyers have committed five penalties in each game. Those 30 total penalty minutes have taken away from Michkov’s minutes because the young winger doesn’t play when the Flyers are shorthanded.
And when you beat the two-time defending champion Panthers, it’s tough to complain about Michkov not playing the final seven and a half minutes. He still finished with a comprehensible 14:56 minutes and he wasn’t the only player to lose ice time down the stretch of the Flyers’ 5-2 home-opening win Monday night.
“I’ve got to get people on the ice, so I get it,” Tocchet said Tuesday. “But he’s playing 15 minutes and we won the hockey game, so we’ve got to kind of move past that.
“We’re killing five penalties a game, so the game shrinks to 50 minutes. You’ve got to get people out there, I get it, but we’re a balanced type of team, we’re not a one-line team, we’re not a team that plays guys 25 minutes if we’re going to win.”
Michkov doesn’t have a point through the Flyers’ 1-1-1 start. After Monday’s morning skate, Tocchet divulged that Michkov dealt with an ankle issue at some point this offseason, which limited some of his training.
But the 20-year-old still looked like his dynamic self in training camp and the preseason.
“He had some stuff in the summer that he couldn’t really train and he’s behind the eight ball,” Tocchet said, “so we’ve got to get him skating.”
The head coach liked the way Michkov skated Monday night and Tuesday in practice.
“There’s two good days together,” Tocchet said. “We’ve just got to stack some days for him.”
Last season, Michkov played 80 of 82 games and was one of the NHL’s top rookies. The Flyers wanted to be careful with a teenager from Russia making the jump to the NHL. As part of the process, former head coach John Tortorella sat Michkov for two games in November and cut his minutes at different times of the season.
Tocchet was asked about the thought of healthy scratching players to give them a mental or physical reset. It doesn’t sound like he’ll go that route with Michkov, especially this early in the season.
“No,” Tocchet said. “For a guy like him, he has got to play through it.”
