© Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

Matvei Michkov surveyed the stands at Flyers Training Center on the first day of Philadelphia Flyers rookie camp in September and was taken aback.

The cold bleachers were packed with fans hot to see the most exciting prospect to arrive in Philadelphia in more than 30 years. More than two dozen of them had been lined up for more than 30 minutes before the building in Voorhees, New Jersey, opened to spectators, several already wearing his No. 39 Flyers jersey.

“It’s an unbelievable feeling,” the Russia-born 19-year-old said with help from an interpreter. “Words can’t even describe it.”

For the first time since Eric Lindros fever captured Philadelphia, and the NHL for that matter, in 1992, the Flyers have a prospect who is creating a stir on and off the ice, most of it coming before he even played a game.

“It’s impressive,” Flyers president of hockey operations Keith Jones said. “He has a certain aura about him. I think a lot of young people have followed him for a long time. That’s the benefit we have with YouTube and all the rest of that stuff, all the skillful things that he can do. I’m not surprised by it. There’s definitely a buzz around him.”

The buzz was evident during his first regular-season home game for the Flyers against the Vancouver Canucks on Saturday. When Michkov came out for pregame introduction, the response was among the loudest from the 19,083 fans in attendance.

On Wednesday, a national TV audience will get to see him in action when the Flyers play the Washington Capitals (7:30 p.m. ET; MAX, TruTV, TNT, SN1, TVAS) in the second half of a back-to-back, home-and-home set. The Capitals won 4-1 in Philadelphia on Tuesday. .

Selected by the Flyers with the No. 7 pick in the 2023 NHL Draft, Michkov wasn’t expected to arrive in Philadelphia until the 2026-27 season after fulfilling a three-year contract with SKA St. Petersburg in the Kontinental Hockey League.

© Dave Sandford/NHLI via Getty Images

But those plans changed in late June when the final two seasons of that deal were voided, and the forward signed his three-year, entry-level contract with the Flyers on July 1.

Three weeks later he arrived in North America, with Jones and general manager Daniel Briere among members of the front office greeting Michkov at Kennedy International Airport in New York and driving him right to Flyers Training Center to get acquainted with the staff, his teammates and the area.

The trajectory has been pointed upward since then.

“A high-end, first-round prospect like him, with that much skill, that much potential, it’s probably been a while since we’ve had one,” Flyers captain Sean Couturier said. “It’s fun to see the excitement.”

There’s also excitement on the business side of the organization.

Todd Glickman, chief revenue officer for the Flyers and Comcast Spectacor, which owns the team, said the Flyers had a season ticket renewal rate of 96 percent after last season.

But the Michkov signing provided quite the accelerant when it came to new sales and new excitement.

“Everything was already rolling and then the Michkov announcement really added fuel to the fire in my mind,” he said.

“We never experienced a lull in the summer. It just kept it going. Our week-over-week numbers, it kept it going. … We were rocketshipping out of our renewal numbers, selling season [tickets] at the draft, and then this really put gasoline on the fire.”

* * *

When Lindros arrived in Philadelphia for training camp in 1992, the 19-year-old already had an established identity. As an 18-year-old, the center played for Canada at the 1991 Canada Cup, finishing tied for sixth with five points (three goals, two assists) in eight games on a team packed with established NHL stars, including 10 who have been enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame (not including Lindros). There also was the saga surrounding his refusal to play for the Quebec Nordiques after they selected him No. 1 in the 1991 NHL Draft, and the Nordiques agreeing to trades with the New York Rangers and Flyers on the same day before an arbitrator awarded Lindros’ rights to the Flyers.

“It was crazy,” said Mark Recchi, a Flyers forward at the time. “It was incredible. Just the excitement. The big trade, the big everything. It was just huge for Philadelphia. It was just such a big deal.”

© Scott Levy/Getty Images

That big deal carried into packed stands during training camp at the Coliseum in Voorhees, where the Flyers practiced at the time, including a proliferation of No. 88 jerseys with Lindros’ name on them before he even played an NHL game.

“It was absolutely jammed,” Recchi said. “There were people everywhere. You could just feel the excitement. He gets on the ice and everybody obviously gets excited. Everything he did, every move he made, people were excited about it and it was just really fun to be part of it.”

Lindros was the centerpiece of the marketing campaign for a team that had missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs the previous three seasons, at the time the longest drought in Philadelphia history.

“I remember our staff a week or two after saying when we announced that signing we sold more season tickets than they did after they won the Stanley Cup (in 1974 and ’75),” said Jay Snider, the Flyers president at the time. “It was that level of impact.”

Lindros did his best to block out the external noise.

“You feel the pressure,” he said. “You feel the desire to go and practice hard and understand that as things go really well in practice, and you stay consistent with it, and you do what you’re being asked by the head coach, the assistant coach, the trainers … you just listen to what they’re asking you to do, and you just go ahead and do it. You don’t go home and read every little article. You just go and play.”

Helping that adjustment was the protection of his teammates.

“I had great guys like Kevin Dineen, he was fantastic,” Lindros said. “Dave Brown. Doug Evans was another guy. Keith Acton, he was my [road] roommate my first year. You rely on these older guys because you don’t know the routine.

“I didn’t know how the rules worked, I didn’t know the culture of, what you do, what you don’t, apart from wearing a tie and going out there and just minding your p’s and q’s and going out and playing. I didn’t know some of this finer stuff, and what’s expected, where you sit on the bus, where you sit on the plane.”

Dineen, a decade older at 29 and in his ninth NHL season, became Lindros’ landlord when the rookie moved into a room in the home where Dineen and his wife, Annie, lived.

“He basically moved into our attic for a year and a half,” Dineen said. “We had an extra buddy around there and we had some great times, the three of us. My wife was attending college at [the University of Pennsylvania], and he and I would get on the train and go over there and sit in on some of her classes.”

Lindros was second on the Flyers in 1992-93 with 41 goals and third with 75 points in 61 games, and he finished fourth in voting for the Calder Trophy as NHL rookie of the year.

Philadelphia missed the playoffs, but Lindros became a star on the ice and a pivotal piece for the Flyers in their search to find financing for a new arena; the venue, now called Wells Fargo Center, opened in 1996.

“The interest in premium seats and tickets and everything was tremendous,” Snider said. “Our phones were ringing off the hook. In my mind, financially, bringing Eric Lindros to Philadelphia was a winner, no doubt. We sold suites, we sold club seats, we sold advertising. We sold tickets because of Eric Lindros.”

Lindros credited the help he got from his teammates, especially Dineen, for his successful first season. He said the Flyers having two other Russia-born players to support Michkov — goalie Ivan Fedotov and defenseman Egor Zamula — will be a big help.

“They’re going to be just as important off the ice to him as they are on the ice,” Lindros said.

* * *

Glickman, who was a Flyers ticket sales representative when Lindros came to Philadelphia, called Michkov’s arrival this season “the same, but different. Back then, where that franchise was, [Lindros] was the sole lifeblood that kind of reinvigorated it.”

The marketing push around Michkov intentionally has been very different.

“There’s been a lot of discussion around that,” Glickman said. “How do we bring him in? How are we going to market this and do it the right way? You don’t want to upset the apple cart in terms of the balance of what’s happening right now. … was our only star, if you remember. This, the way we look at it, is much more of a team atmosphere. When you look at our billboards, you look at our creative, it’s much more a soft landing point to bring [Michkov] in so he can acclimate and whatnot.”

So far that plan has worked. Without Michkov being emphasized, among other metrics, sales of his jersey are among the highest on the team.

“I’ve never seen that many of the jerseys with my name,” Michkov said during training camp.

That kind of growth is what has the Flyers excited for what kind of impact Michkov could have as he gets further adjusted to life in North America.

“It’s happened organically, which is really cool,” Jones said. “It just shows our fans are paying attention and are really looking forward to him playing real games. We’re all excited about it. So I’m happy that our fans are pumped up about it.”

But much like the soft-touch approach to marketing, the Flyers hockey operations department purposely is keeping the bar low on what kind of impact Michkov can have on the ice.

“We don’t see him as a savior,” Briere said. “That’s certainly not what we’re putting on his shoulders. He’s 19 years old, he’s coming in to learn, to expand his game. We hope that the sky’s the limit for him. But we’re certainly not expecting him to be the savior of this team.”

However, the need for a player of Michkov’s skill level is obvious. The Flyers were 27th in scoring last season (2.82 goals per game) and had the worst power play in the NHL (12.2 percent).

Michkov had 41 points (19 goals, 22 assists) in 48 games in the KHL last season, the second-most in league history for a teenage player.

“We are starving for the type of plays that he can make, the instinctive plays that he can make,” coach John Tortorella said.

Teammates already have seen it. When defenseman Travis Sanheim was asked about improving the power play, he said, “I’m sure Michkov is going to have something to say about that.”

And so far he has. Michkov had scored two goals in six games, each coming on the power play in a 4-3 overtime loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Oct. 15. And Philadelphia had five power-play goals in its first five games; it took them 17 games to score five on the man-advantage last season.

Michkov leads the Flyers with five points (two goals, three assists) in six games.

Now it’s about finding that comfort level for Michkov on and off the ice for the long term, with the hope that he can have an impact on the Flyers the same way Lindros did. Part of that has been making sure Zamula and Fedotov are constant companions, and the team also hired an English-language tutor for him.

“I’m happy for him,” said Capitals forward Alex Ovechkin, who was unquestionably the most hyped prospect to come to the NHL from Russia when he arrived in 2004. “He’s a talented guy. He’s in good hands over here. Just have to be patient and play his game, and everything’s going to be fine.”

The expectations for now will remain low, but the excitement level only is going to grow.

“He’s 19 years old, he still has a lot to learn,” Briere said. “There’s going to be some ups and downs in his season. On the flip side of that, he’s been dealing with this pressure for a long time already. It’s almost as if he’s comfortable in it so far. But obviously it’s our job also to protect him as much as we can.”