Seven games into the season, Philadelphia doesn't have a win. That's a crisis on its own. The real problem is that the one player who looks like a genuine NHL scorer is riding the bench while his coach pretends not to notice.
Carolina beat Philadelphia 4-1 Sunday, pushing the Flyers to 0-5-2, the worst start in franchise history. Boos rained down, and chants calling for Rick Tocchet's job rang out — thin and scattered, coming from the few fans who stuck around, but real.
Matvei Michkov entered Sunday as the only Flyer with more than one goal this season, and he still barely touched the puck. He didn't register a shot on goal against Carolina and still doesn't have an assist this season. None of that is new. Tocchet benched him twice during last spring's playoff run, including the game that ended Philadelphia's season, turning instead to a teenager making his playoff debut. Michkov has reportedly been sat multiple times again already this year, with Tocchet's explanation always some version of the same complaint: he won't play defense the way the coach wants.
Fine. Teach him. Bench him for a shift to make the point, then put him back out. Turning your most talented forward into an afterthought while the rest of the roster can't score makes no sense. Philadelphia entered Sunday near the bottom of the league in goals scored, and the response to an offense that can't find the net has been to shrink the ice time of the guy who can actually finish. That's plain stubbornness.
The case for patience isn't nothing: this is the same coach and roughly the same roster that made a surprise playoff run a year ago, and seven games in an 82-game season can look like a crater and still just be a pothole. If Tocchet rights this in a month, nobody remembers October.
But the Michkov pattern didn't start this week. It started last postseason, when his own GM had to publicly address it, and now runs straight through a winless start that's the worst in franchise history. A coach who inherited a 19-year-old with real offensive gifts and has spent a year and a half trying to coach it out of him is wasting an asset. The losing is just the part everyone can see on the scoreboard.
Tocchet bought himself a year of benefit of the doubt with the playoff run. He's burning through it by benching the one player this team can't afford to bury. If the losing continues and Michkov stays glued to the bench, firing him will be overdue.
