Matvei Michkov and the Flyers have a swirl of questions around them. His answers Tuesday will only add more.

In Bizarro Flyers World, in a parallel dimension where up is down and down is up and the team’s most promising player is a plodding defenseman named Morter Partone, Matvei Michkov hasn’t appeared in an NHL game yet. That scenario isn’t pure make-believe. It was supposed to play out after the Flyers drafted Michkov in 2023. Three years. That’s how long he was locked into his contract with Russian club SKA St. Petersburg. That’s how long the Flyers and their fans were going to have to wait for him.

That’s how long the collective anticipation around Michkov — the hope and belief that he will blossom into stardom — has been building. And that’s why so much of the offseason chatter and prognostication about the Flyers will center around Michkov, his development, his relationship with coach Rick Tocchet, and his future with the organization.

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Tocchet and the Flyers invited some of that chatter with their decision to bench Michkov for Game 4 of the team’s second-round series against the Carolina Hurricanes — the 3-2 overtime loss that eliminated the Flyers from the playoffs. But questions, possibilities, and relative concerns have been hovering around Michkov since the moment the Flyers drafted him, and they defy an easy narrative (e.g. He’s a bust! … The Flyers are sabotaging him!), despite what anyone might read in the orange-and-black-tinted corners of social media. Let’s confront some of them.

— Michkov said Tuesday at the team’s locker cleanout day that he and Tocchet have a “very simple work relationship — good relationship.” When asked if he understood what the Flyers wanted him to work on over the summer to improve, Michkov said, “Can I skip that question?” When asked if there was any aspect of his game that he would focus on, he got a little defensive.

“Not sure what to answer on that question,” he said. “I will work. I’ll just put the work in. Do you think I was not ready after the Olympic break in your opinion? Next year, I plan to be even better than after the Olympic break.”

The answers didn’t paint a picture of a warm and huggy kinship between phenom and coach. Tocchet was publicly critical of Michkov in early February, causing a small firestorm that general manager Danny Brière had to (try to) put out. But benching Michkov for Game 4 against Carolina was more than just an acknowledgment of how poorly he had played during the postseason. Given that the Flyers replaced him in the lineup with 19-year-old Jett Luchanko, whose season in the minors had hardly earned him a call-up in an elimination game, the move seemed a bit of message-sending from the organization to Michkov.

— Remember: John Tortorella sat Michkov a few times last season, too.

— There’s nothing necessarily wrong with teaching hard lessons to a young, promising athlete. Just because a coach is tough on a player doesn’t mean the player doesn’t need and won’t respond to that tough love. The irony of the complaints among some Flyers fans that Tocchet, Brière, and president Keith Jones risk souring Michkov on the organization or stunting his development is that plenty of Sixers fans have made the exact opposite complaint about their favorite team’s kid-gloves treatment of Joel Embiid early in his career.

— Michkov is 21. He has spent just two years living in the United States. His father died suddenly in April 2023. Based on those circumstances alone, I’m inclined to be more patient and tolerant of the inconsistency so far in his performance, including his failure to be in shape for the start of this season’s training camp. It’s the rare athlete, even a star, whose improvement traces a clean, unbroken line upward. There are fits and starts and regressions and great leaps, and the cultural and language barriers that Michkov faces are generally not overcome overnight.

For instance, Noah Cates, who was Michkov’s linemate for most of the season, described the tedious process of working with him off the ice so that the two could be in sync on it.

“A couple of times, he wanted to do some video in a hotel or whatnot,” Cates said Tuesday. “That could take an hour, watching clips, also with the coaches. It’s a little maybe more time-consuming, but we’re at the rink six hours a day. It’s not a big deal obviously to help the team or help your line get to that next level. Different things like that were a little slower, a little more methodical with communicating. At the end of the day, most of it got done, and I think we helped each other out.”

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— Skating coach Slava Kuznetsov took care of translation duties for Michkov on Tuesday, as he does whenever Michkov is made available to the media. It would benefit Michkov and the media and fans who want to hear what he says if the Flyers were to hire a full-time interpreter for him; hasting his mastery of English and making it easier for him to communicate in the here and now shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. But for what it’s worth, an Inquirer staffer who speaks fluent Russian reviewed Michkov’s answers Tuesday and said that Kuznetsov’s translations were accurate.

— Michkov is under the Flyers’ control until at last July 1, 2027, when he becomes a restricted free agent, and clothing racks loaded with his No. 39 jersey filled the pro shop in the Flyers Training Center on Tuesday. The organization has invested too much time and effort into him, and it’s still too early in Michkov’s career, to give up on him. But there is a risk here for Jones, Brière, Tocchet, and the Flyers. They’ve already had one budding star — Cutter Gauthier — make it clear that he didn’t want to be here anymore. If things do end up going bad with Michkov, it will be fair to question whether the Flyers are handling their most talented prospects in the best of ways.