John Tortorella was a guest on TNT’s pregame show on Wednesday night, and opened up about some of the challenges facing him as Matvei Michkov’s head coach.
The 19-year-old Russian is playing in his rookie season with the Flyers after being drafted seventh overall in the 2023 NHL Draft and getting out of his KHL contract early over the summer.
Michkov has shown flashes of brilliance during the 2024-25 season. The Flyers winger is second on the team in goals and overall scoring, notching 15 points (6g, 9a) in 18 games.
But that doesn’t mean the kid hasn’t had his fair share of struggles. Recently, Tortorella healthy-scratched Michkov for two games so that the forward could get a different perspective of the team’s system from above.
“It’s part of the process,” Tortorella said in early November per Crossing Broad. “Just part of the process. I mean, I told you guys. Young guy, they can watch tape too as part of their development. It’s trying to help them.”
In his conversation with TNT, Tortorella said that he’s mostly abandoned coaching Michkov at the moment because his attempts to do so fall on deaf ears; it’s clear Michkov doesn’t understand. Tortorella is now having weekly meetings with Michkov through an interpreter, Slava Kuznetsov.
John Tortorella: It’s been a little difficult for me because the way I like to coach is, if something happens, I’m hitting that right away. On the bench, in practice, whatever it may be. I’m not going back and waiting and going through the coach’s handbook and trying to figure out how to handle that situation or whatever arises. I think it’s pretty important, spontaneous coaching. I can’t do that with Mich because he just doesn’t understand.
I tried it on the bench one night. There was a situation that I’m trying to explain and he’s ‘yeah, yeahing’ me, but he really doesn’t know what I’m saying.
So what we’ve done here is we started using (Egor) Zamula (to translate) but Zamula’s game started going downhill so we just left him alone as the interpreter. We just wanted him to play.
What we’re doing here now is once a week that we have an interpreter and we sit down in my office and we go over things and I want to listen to him, he has to listen to me. It’s easier that way.
So it’s been difficult because I’m not a big one-on-one meeting guy. If it happens, it happens; We do it right there, whether in the room, whatever.
I think that’s a healthy way of coaching. But with him, it has to be a little bit different because he’s 19, there’s so much going on around him and he really doesn’t understand.
He speaks better as we’ve gone on here. But I don’t think he totally understands some of the things we’re going through. So we’re trying to be careful about it. We’re going to try to slow it down and do it once a week with him.
Torts was also asked if he sees any similarities in his game to past elite players he’s coached.
John Tortorella: Off the top of my head, I look at him and I can’t think of really a player that’s similar to him, but with him, there are situations where I’m watching him and he makes these little three, four-foot passes that I don’t think a lot of people can make. His skating, he’s not the fastest skater, or the quickest skater, but he has this innate ability to be able to make plays in tight (spaces). I remember coaching (Artemi) Panarin in Columbus. He can make plays all over the place. (Panarin) is a little bit different because he lets plays go by him, and then slows the game down. Mich is making plays in the action where you’re going, ‘Mich, Mich — oh, great play.’ It’s one of those.
We are really, the whole coaching staff, really pushing him not to worry about mistakes or tunovers. We’ll go through the coaching of that through more games. We need to see his offense. We’re not a great offensive team, and we want him to explore himself and not be afraid to make a mistake.
Now, if he goes off the rail and it’s too much, that’s when we have to coach him a little bit. Very similar to Travis Konecny. TK is all over the place, and you never know what he’s going to do, but he makes great offensive plays. We want to allow him to do that, then we’ll decide when we need to bring him back. Mich is, we’ve gone through a number of things as the season’s started here, and some disagreements along the way, but that’s healthy. Everyone gets all amped up about it, but it’s healthy.
He’s being honest with me, I’m being honest with him, and you get to the point where you’re solving problems quicker that way.
That’s what I like about him. He’s got some jam to him. He has opinions and I’d rather have a player that way instead of trying to suck it out of him. It’s going to be fun to coach him and he really does some special things. Really looking forward to it as we progress here.
