Matvei Michkov can change the Flyers’ complex history with Russian players

Starting with Matvei Michkov’s first pre-draft interview with the Flyers, the organization’s power people never had to wait or worry to see how he set his priorities, whether the old and outdated stereotype of a Russian hockey player still applied to him.

Flyers general manager Danny Brière had heard it before he entered the NHL and throughout his 17-year playing career: European players in general, and Russians more specifically, cared more about winning a World Championship for their native country than about winning a Stanley Cup. Yet Michkov, without prompting, told Brière and the team’s scouts and representatives that he wanted nothing more than to help the Flyers hoist the Cup. He begged them to trade up from their No. 7 spot to make sure they could pick him, and he left little doubt that his father, Andrei, had handed down to him a healthy admiration for the team the Flyers had once been.

As a boy in the Soviet Union, Andrei had regarded the Broad Street Bullies as a forbidding legend for the way they had crushed the Red Army team at the Spectrum in January 1976. And before his death at 51 — two months ahead of the 2023 draft, when his son fell to the Flyers at No. 7 — he had raised Matvei to hold the franchise in the same esteem.

» READ MORE: The Flyers will be fascinating this season. They probably won’t be good for a while.

“I think it’s ingrained in him,” Brière said in a recent interview. “The Flyers had a special place because they played against his team. I think a lot of Russians respected the Flyers. The Flyers mean something to a lot of people there.”

That meaning depends on the person, on the era, on the nature of the Flyers’ posture toward Russia and its politics and its hockey players — a relationship that has been fraught and complex for more than a half-century. Michkov’s arrival and early success — he scored his first two NHL goals Tuesday night in Edmonton against the Oilers — offer the promise that, for the first time, the Flyers’ centerpiece, their best and most talented and most important player, will be a Russian. They have traveled a long and crooked road to reach this point.

Anyone familiar with the Flyers knows that there have been moments and incidents that, understandably, created the impression that the organization was never anything but hostile toward Russian players and to the notion that one or more might wear orange and black.

In the 1972 Summit Series, Bob Clarke broke the ankle of Soviet star Valeri Kharlamov with a vicious slash. Four years later, in the Flyers’ 4-1 dominant victory over the Red Army, defenseman Ed Van Impe freight-trained Kharlamov with a brutal body check that compelled Soviet coach Konstantin Loktev to pull his team off the ice in protest.

The rest of the story is an essential aspect of the franchise’s mythology from that period: Only when Flyers chairman Ed Snider threatened that the Soviets wouldn’t get paid for the exhibition game did they return to play. Communists in name, capitalists at heart, right? Striking a symbolic blow for freedom and democracy, the Flyers then commenced with beating what was supposed to be the greatest team in the world.

To this day, though, those episodes obscure a couple of significant ways in which the Flyers had acknowledged Russia’s inevitable and powerful influence on North American hockey. Fred Shero, their innovative head coach, studied the Soviets and their creative, free-flowing style of play, incorporating some of their tactics into his systems. And in 1975, the Flyers became the first NHL team to draft a Soviet-born player, taking Viktor Khatulev, a 6-foot-3, 200-pound forward, in the ninth round.

Khatulev, who died in 1994 at 39, having struggled with alcoholism throughout his brief life, “was one Soviet player who just might have fit in with the old Broad Street Bullies,” hockey historian Joe Pelletier once wrote. In 1979, with the pro team Dinamo Riga, Khatulev accidentally punched a referee during a fight. In 1981, he earned a lifetime suspension from the Soviet Hockey League for, according to Pelletier, “rough play and other off-ice shenanigans. There were rumors that he was also being punished for his drinking and/or for his being drafted by the American team.”

The Flyers subsequently did and said a lot to frame their decision to draft Khatulev as an exception to their team-building philosophy and organizational principles. Snider opposed having NHL teams compete against touring Soviet clubs because he was so disgusted by the persecution of Jewish people there. From 1984 through 1990, his first six years as the team’s general manager, Clarke did not draft a single Soviet, and in an early-1990s video celebrating the Flyers’ 25th anniversary, he said that he “hated the Russians.”

» READ MORE: Matvei Michkov has been hyped as the Flyers’ savior. Please, everyone, be patient.

It took until 1991 before a Russian player — forward Andrei Lomakin, signed by then-GM Russ Farwell — finally appeared in a game for the Flyers. When the Detroit Red Wings, featuring their “Russian Five” core of Sergei Fedorov, Igor Larionov, Slava Fetisov, Slava Kozlov, and Vladimir Konstantinov, swept the Flyers in the 1997 Stanley Cup Final, it seemed a fitting comeuppance for a franchise that had been slow to embrace a revolution within the sport.

“Things change,” Brière said. “You can’t get stuck in that rut forever.”

The Flyers, to be fair, did not. They’ve had 25 Russian players — 22 skaters and three goalies — suit up for them, a figure that isn’t an outlier among the NHL’s 32 clubs. Some have had more: the New York Rangers (31), the Chicago Blackhawks (29), and the New Jersey Devils (28). Some have had fewer, including the Pittsburgh Penguins (13) and, surprisingly, the Red Wings (18).

What sets Michkov apart, in that context, isn’t that the Flyers used such a high draft pick on a Russian player. It’s that, given that he had three years remaining on a five-year contract with SKA St. Petersburg of the Kontinental Hockey League when they drafted him, they took such a risk in banking that he’d be able to play for them anytime soon, if at all.

“That’s kind of our new mentality: It doesn’t scare us,” Brière said. “At the end of the day, we don’t care where they’re from. If they’re good players, good people, and winners, it doesn’t really matter what nationality it is for us.”

There was a time when it did. That history still lingers, however slightly. The Flyers are giving Matvei Michkov, just 19, the chance to bury it once and for all.