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Russia's hottest prospect since Alex Ovechkin
Matvei Michkov was born in 2004, six months after Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin were picked one and two in the NHL Draft. The 15-year-old youngster from Perm has broken scoring records galore at Lokomotiv Yaroslavl.
There are still a couple of years to go until you will see Matvei Michkov make his debut in the KHL or play in the National Hockey League, but the 15-year-old shows promising signs and could in a few years become the next big star from Russia.
Since Alexander Ovechkin and Yevgeni Malkin were drafted first and second by Washington and Pittsburgh respectively in 2004, Russia has had other world-class players making the NHL but no other forward has come close to the super-star impact of this duo.
But this could be due to change in a few years as scouts have their eyes on 15-year-old scoring wonder Matvei Michkov, who was born about half a year after Ovechkin and Malkin had been drafted and is the dominant U16 player in Russia.
Of course there’s still some development to go through within the three years until he can be drafted by an NHL team in 2023 and show his skills at the World Juniors and against grown men in professional hockey. But the numbers and the skill on various videos have caught attention among those following the potential stars of the future in the land of the Red Machine who call him a young genius.
Already as a 10-year-old he left his first marks in the Russian media. Playing the Maxim Sushinski Cup far away from his hometown of Perm with a team from St. Petersburg, he impressed and was picked for his first interview on video.
In season 18/19 with Lokomotiv Yaroslavl’s class of 2004 he played 21 games in his regional league, the Open Championship of Moscow, and had 55 goals and 33 assists. No player has ever scored more goals in such a championship of the U15 age category and during the past ten years no player has scored more than 40 goals in this age group. (Ovechkin is known for having scored 59 goals in one season but that was in the U12 category.) He was also used in the class of 2003 where he had 7 goals and 3 assists in 7 games.
Michkov captained his team to the regional championship and Lokomotiv eventually won silver in the national final event in Sochi behind CSKA Moscow. Of course Michkov was also the scoring leader at national level with 29 goals and 14 assists in just 8 games despite being kept scoreless in the 6-3 loss to CSKA in the deciding game of the round-robin event.
Also outside of club hockey he caught the eye. In the championship of district selects teams he shone for the Central Federal District Team. The team scored a tournament-leading 69 goals in eight games. Michkov scored 23 of these and had 12 assists making him involved in more than half of the goals.
A player scoring that many goals could become cocky. But Michkov tries to stay down to earth and doesn’t want to comment comparisons to Ovechkin while saying that his numbers are not his main goal.
"I don’t care about the amount of goals. I want that the team is in first place, that’s the main thing".
Asked about his favourite player, he mentions Artemi Panarin but then adds: “There are many good players and I want to take something from every good player.” As favourite teams in professional hockey he’s quick to name the Russian national team and his own organization, Lokomotiv Yaroslavl.
Michkov hails from Perm and played much of his youth hockey in the city of one million people with the Molot-Prikamie Perm organization in the Ural – West Siberia hockey region. He was living in a region from where Kazakhstan is closer than Moscow. Until 2015. Then he moved 1,000 kilometres westwards with his parents and brother to support his hockey development closer to Moscow.
“I was invited by Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. They have one of the best youth hockey schools and it’s a KHL city. I moved with the family. It wasn’t very easy in the beginning but then it was okay,” he said.
Michkov doesn’t have the size of Ovechkin. He has been growing to 174 cm in recent years and will certainly add some centimetres and kilos. But he makes up for the body mass with fast and agile skating, smooth hands, a hockey sense far advanced for his age group and goal scoring instincts that makes hockey look easy when watching him.
In may 2020 Matvei Michkov moved to SKA St. Petersburg.
FHD3:17
2024-10-18 15:01
