An injury to Tyson Foerster opened an opportunity for the struggling Matvei Michkov to find a way to bust through his sophomore slump. Unfortunately for Michkov, that hasn't happened yet. The Philadelphia Flyers are roughly halfway through their 2025-26 campaign, and he's still having a tough time getting anything going.
What's worse is that the Flyers have played well as a unit. They're tied with their heated rival, the Pittsburgh Penguins, for third place in the Metropolitan Division with a game in hand, and they have become one of the hardest teams to score on this season.
Philadelphia has solid scorers like Trevor Zegras and Travis Konecny, and a surprise in Christian Dvorak, who's on pace for a career-high in points. So it's not like Michkov doesn't have talented players he can dish the puck to and take shots on net when they pass him the puck.
Still, he has just 23 points and nine goals in 40 games, putting him on pace to end the year with 47 points and 18 goals. That would be 16 fewer points than the 63 he put up in 2024-25, and eight fewer goals.
There is no end in sight for Matvei Michkov's sophomore slump
Michkov has nine points and just one goal in his previous 16 games. That's a serious issue for a player expected to step up and help a team that still ranks just 21st in goals scored to produce more when they have the puck. Michkov has just 30 shots on goal in that span, and has 63 total shots, missing the net three more times than his shots have reached it.
He was a brewing staple on the power play in 2024-25, where he put up 17 points and eight goals. This season, he has just one goal on the man advantage and five points total when the Flyers are at 5-on-4. Some of that has to do with the Flyers' struggling power play, which has converted just 15.6 percent of its opportunities. But that's another opportunity for him to step up, and it hasn't happened.
The dip in Michkov's play has also affected his ice time. During his rookie season, Michkov averaged 16:41 per game, compared to just 14:33 in 2025-26. It has gotten even worse for Michkov during the Flyers' recent road trip. Over the past five games, Michkov has averaged just 13:31 of ice time per game, indicating that head coach Rick Tocchet is losing trust in him.
There is still another half-season left for Michkov to turn things around
While Michkov has struggled in 2025-26, he had his ups and downs over the first half of 2024-25. Over his first 40 games last season, Michkov had 29 points and 12 goals. Solid numbers, but he took things up a notch during the final 40 games of his rookie season.
Michkov exploded for 34 points and 14 goals, looking like a player on the rise. The performance raised the bar for 2025-26. That hasn't translated so far, but recent history shows that Michkov starts getting hot in January.
If he can emulate the performance he had between Jan. and Apr. 2025 this season, Michkov would add another dimension to a Flyers scoring unit that needs more point-producers at a time when every game is starting to count.