Leafs have little reason to move unhappy Mikheyev
When Ilya Mikheyev signed a contract with the Maple Leafs last fall, it was portrayed by his camp as a personal financial sacrifice in the name of the franchise’s greater good.
Mikheyev’s two-year deal, at a rate of about $1.645 million (U.S.) a season, wasn’t as rich as it might have been had the Russian forward been hellbent on milking every last nickel out of the Leafs in the grand tradition of certain higher-profile teammates.
Said Mikheyev’s agent Dan Milstein at the time: “Some players are willing to give what you’d call discounts because they want to win.”
A little less than a year later, things have changed. If Mikheyev was willing to take less in the name of winning, it seems he’s not willing to play less in the course of losing. Or so goes the report from Hockey Night in Canada’s Elliotte Friedman that Mikheyev, apparently disenchanted with his role and his ice time in Leafland, asked to be traded in the wake of Toronto’s first-round playoff ouster at the hands of the Montreal Canadiens.
Asking and receiving, of course, are two different things. While the club’s resident endorser of canned soup may well be in the midst of an off-season stew, it only makes sense that the Leafs haven’t pulled the trigger on a move.
The club isn’t commenting. Neither is the customarily loquacious Milstein. But with Zach Hyman transplanted to Edmonton and Joe Thornton now in Florida, Toronto’s depth chart on the wing isn’t exactly an embarrassment of riches. Mikheyev at his best offers a bargain, bare-bones version of Hyman’s fleet-footed relentlessness, especially on the penalty kill. And if it never makes sense to trade a player whose stock is down, Mikheyev’s is lower than optimal.
Which to this eye is a problem of his own creation. If Mikheyev is bummed out about his lack of playoff ice time — and he averaged 13:22 in those seven games against the Canadiens, seventh-most among Leaf forwards — he might have made his case by making a more significant playoff contribution. Mikheyev didn’t register so much as a point in this past post-season. He didn’t register so much as a point in last summer’s five-game playin series defeat at the hands of the Columbus Blue Jackets. That’s 12 playoff games as a Leaf and goose eggs across the boxscore.
If Mikheyev is bummed out about his lack of regular-season ice time — and he averaged 14:13 a game, eighth among Toronto forwards — he might have made his case by converting his chances at a more capable rate. Mikheyev registered 107 shots on net last season and scored just seven goals. According to NHL.com, there isn’t a forward in the league who hit the net as often and scored as infrequently.
Maybe there was some bad luck at play, sure. Maybe it’ll turn in Mikheyev’s coming contract year. Still, Pierre Engvall, nobody’s idea of a Rocket Richard candidate, played 12 fewer games than Mikheyev and scored exactly as many goals last season. Hyman played 11 fewer games than Mikheyev and scored more than twice as many times.
So yes, on one hand Mikheyev is a bullet train of a straightline skater, a guy who famously engaged in a near-rink-length foot race with Connor McDavid last season and won the puck.
On the other hand, that speed sometimes ensures that maybe nobody in the NHL is quicker at transforming an odd-man rush or an in-alone chance into an anticlimax.
It’s not that Mikheyev can’t offer a legitimate excuse for the stone-handedness of his stats. He competed in last summer’s play-in series after enduring a brutal rehabilitation from a serious injury to his right wrist, which was severely damaged by an accidental run-in with a skate blade in December of 2019. Before that injury, Mikheyev scored eight goals in 39 games for the Leafs — a slightly better conversion rate than he managed this past season.
And Mikheyev, too, could make the case he’s put up such underwhelming numbers as a matter of design. His defensive-zone-start percentage of 66 per cent was highest among Toronto regulars last season, according to Hockey-Reference.com. He played more short-handed minutes than any Toronto forward not named Mitch Marner. And if you need proof that he could be putting up better offensive numbers if only he were given more of an offensive shake, his representative would likely point out that he did score 23 goals in 63 games in the KHL season before he agreed to join the Leafs as a free agent.
Still, the KHL and NHL are different worlds. Skill-based limitations are skill-based limitations, especially in a player who’ll turn 27 before next month’s season opener against Montreal. And it’s not as though the Leafs haven’t tried to see the bright side to Mikheyev’s more-than-occasional aversion to putting his name on the scoresheet.
“There’s lots of things to like about his game even when he’s not producing offence,” head coach Sheldon Keefe said this past season. “I still see lots of value in all the things that he does on the ice throughout a game. As we know, it’s a 60minute hockey game and even if you happen to score a goal at one point in time, there’s a lot more time that you’re on the ice. He finds ways to be productive over the grand scheme of the game.”
Still, you couldn’t blame Keefe for using Mikheyev sparingly at big moments against the Canadiens. Mikheyev got less than his usual run of play in Games 1 and 7, logging 10:54 and 11:43 respectively. But in both those games, it’s worth noting, the Leafs trailed from the get-go and never managed to get the lead.
The soup man has a right to stew. But if you’re a coach desperate for a goal, why on earth would you tap Mikheyev’s shoulder in those situations? Speaking of sacrifices for the greater good: If Mikheyev still cares as much about winning as his camp insisted he did when he offered the Leafs a hometown discount on his most recent contract, surely he’d understand as much.