u/upcan845

Elliotte and Kyle spent 9 minutes talking about Michkov on today's episode. Too long to transcribe word for word, but the bullets are:

• Michkov is "obviously" the biggest Philly story of the offseason. The Phillies picture drama shows how everything with Michkov becomes a wild social media debate

• Philly could benefit from a temperature turn down. The season is over, time to relax and sort things out

• Elliotte says this reminds him of Jay Feaster. When Lecavalier and Tortorella weren't getting along, Feaster told them they'd have to figure it out. He wasn't going to fire Torts nor trade Lecavalier. Eventually they won the Cup together

• "I'm not there, I'm not on the inside. It's very obvious to me that there is a problem."

• It's always easier to solve your problem than trade your problem

• He's still young, he's been through a lot both personally and professionally. He's way too young to give up on unless there is something so bad going on that Elliotte doesn't know about

• If you do decide to trade him, it's from a position of weakness

• Look at what happened with Cutter. It's really hard to lose two players with natural gifts like them

• Elliotte gets the sense that nobody on the Flyers seems to complain about Michkov's benchings says the players think there is some justification to this

• If the camp story is true, Michkov should spend most of the summer in Philly

• Michkov's representatives need to be a factor here. Agents have to be a conduit. The best agents know when their guy is part of the problem and the team can go to them

>Elliotte: One of the things the league did this week, Kyle, was they officially announced with the Player's Association the payroll range for next year. And we know that the salary cap is going to be $104m. And all these fans are saying "Oh, our team is going to have this much" and everyone is talking about how they have Eleventy Billion dollars in cap space. There's not enough players to spend it on, right? Some of these fans are going to be disappointed. And I'm not convinced that all of these teams are going to want to go to the cap, and especially since I don't think everyone's going to have access to get the kind of players that you're going to want to get to really jump up there.

> Like I look at Philly, I see a really hard, competitive, workman-like team. They need one more game breaker in the worst way. You can really see it. Especially since Michkov, and again he didn't play a ton late in the game, his minutes, what did he play, 9 minutes?. There's obvious going to be a question here, but I look at the Flyers and I say "Boy, Martone looks like he's a hell of a player, that looks like a 500 level home run. They need a game breaker. That to me, like I think Ottawa has game breakers, Carolina just beat them. They just beat them. I think Philly has a lot of guys who played hard, I don't know how many true game breakers they have. And those are the hardest guys to find.

> Kyle: They may have one in Martone

> Elliotte: Yeah, it's interesting maybe he could be. I just watch them and say they need one. And the easiest way to solve your problem is internal, and maybe Michkov will turn out to be that guy. But I watch them against Carolina, and they might lose anyway, but they just need one more game breaker. They're competing their heads off, I never knock the effort. They need one more game breaker there. One more.