Cutter Gauthier and Matvei Michkov. The Philadelphia Flyers’ first round picks in 2022 and 2023 respectively. The two players will be tasked with leading the future of hockey in Philadelphia, putting the entire weight of the franchise on their back upon their arrivals in the coming years.
Since the Flyers are blowing their draft positioning to kingdom come with their early season wins during a “rebuild”, it insinuates that they believe 20-year-old Cutter Gauthier and 19-year-old Matvei Michkov are going to carry the organization moving forward as the only two top prospects in the system.
There’s a few outcomes to that very overconfident line of thinking. The most optimistic being that, they are, in fact, the next best thing to sweep the league. Michov and Gauthier end up being the new McDavid and Draisaitl, a power couple that can single handedly change the outcome of the game. It’s obviously the kind of thing the weary fanbase dreams about.
Though it doesn’t take much to look at the real Edmonton Oilers and come to the conclusion that a roster with two top players and not much else may not be a solid winning strategy. The two drag the rest of the team to the playoffs every season where they ultimately can’t get the job done because the depth of the rest of the team just isn’t up to snuff.
It’s where having an extra two or three top young players would really come in handy, and could push the team over the edge into legitimate Cup contender status.
There’s also the slightly less optimistic option, being that both Michkov and Gauthier make the jump to the NHL over the next few years, but neither can replicate their production at the professional level. The only two shots the organization has in the chamber end up being blanks.
This is something Flyers fans have grown all too familiar with over the last decade. Overhyping a prospect then they arrive in Philly and just sputter out.
“Overhyping” may be a harsh term when it comes to Michkov and Gauthier, both seem to be players with legitimate high-end potential, certainly higher than what many pretended existed with past picks, but coronating them as franchise saviors before they step foot on NHL ice is a bold and dangerous risk to take.
And the last outcome is the grimmest of them all- neither even play for the Flyers.
As of this writing in November of 2023, neither player is under contract to the Flyers organization. And while it could just be a formality, with contracts coming their way when their other commitments are over, there’s also the negative side here, which is that neither end up making it to Philadelphia in the first place.
Gauthier is a NCAA player. It’s not totally uncommon to see them refuse to sign with the team that drafted them in favor of playing with a team of their choosing instead. And Michkov is still in Russia, and fresh off the Ivan Fedotov situation, it’s not impossible the kid isn’t allowed to leave the motherland in a couple years.
It’s the worst case scenario that probably won’t happen, but it is still very much within the realm of possibility and needs to be considered when planning.
If the Flyers and their fans should’ve learned one thing from the Ron Hextall era, it’s to never count your chickens before they hatch. Putting your prospects on a pedestal as franchise-altering icons before they even play a professional game is not a good decision. Maybe it does come to be… but maybe it doesn’t and is the organization really in any position to take a risk of this caliber?
Gauthier and Michkov are a great start and hopefully have the impact of McDavid/Draisaitl, but it’s more than fair to wonder as to what their plan is beyond those two. The free agent pools these days are never deep enough to bank on filling their problems by throwing money at them, and while some prospects elsewhere in the system are standing out, there isn’t another bonafide home run in the pipeline.
It’s why the Flyers entered the “rebuild” in the first place- they needed to address the lack of talent at most positions throughout the organization. While winning games sooner than expected is a feel-good accomplishment, it puts the long-term future into question by essentially taking away the draft as a point of legitimacy to add the talent. Trying to build a foundation of mid-round picks isn’t a successful strategy. A lesson that should’ve been learned the hard way during the Hextall days.
What comes next for the Flyers? Who really knows. There’s a chance the “triumvirate of leadership” doesn’t even know what their next step is if the team continues to be better than expected. Hopefully they’ve got a trick up their sleeve to acquire talent one way or another because it could be real question much sooner than anticipated.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: Getty Images
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