More thoughts Dylan Larkin's trade request, legacy, player empowerment, and whether it was "soft"

If you'll allow me, let's ramble through this a bit more.

There’s been a ton to unpack in the past five days about the ongoing Dylan Larkin-Detroit Red Wings saga.

And it makes sense, this is the captain of an iconic NHL franchise asking to be dealt away from his hometown, and doing so in pretty dramatic fashion with five years remaining on his contract.

I’ve written about it twice at this site here and here, while I was a guest on the Hockey PDOcast on Monday with my good buddy Dimitri Filipovic to chat about it. I’m sure Robert Tiffin and I will also have some discussion about it, amongst other things, this week on Algorithmically Incorrect Hockey (which will be live on YouTube and simulcast here at Shap Shots.)

I’ve also read a ton from some really smart people on the matter and listened to the episodes my friends over at Winged Wheel Podcast have delivered. The Larkin saga has also become the main topic for local Detroit sports talk radio the past few days.

There’s been a ton and there will be more, but there was a couple things I wanted to unpack a bit more today that have been rolling around in my head on this matter.

Let’s start with the reported trade list that Larkin has submitted according to The Detroit Free Press.

According to the Free Press, Larkin’s trade list includes the Minnesota Wild, Florida Panthers, and Vegas Golden Knights.

From my understanding on the matter, those three teams are certainly on his list. I also believe the list is slightly larger than those three teams, there is another team, I know, that’s been told they are on Larkin’s list of considerations and Elliotte Friedman, who broke the initial news, has said something similar this past weekend.

A three-team list has drawn headlines, and led to some vitriol toward Larkin from Red Wings’ fans, which I understand, but I would like some more clarity here on how exclusive or small that list actually is.

Those three teams, notably feature players that Larkin has international experience and happens to be close with from his time at Team USA — Quinn Hughes, Matthew Tkachuk, and Jack Eichel.

Larkin won a gold medal and partied with those players back in February, they took a trip to the White House together, he kind of got a taste of what Tkachuk and Eichel have experience in recent years, after forcing their own moves out of Calgary and Buffalo, and was highly influenced by them.

It gave me reminders of the 2023 NHL All-Star Weekend down in Florida, fittingly when Larkin was still going through his contract extension talk with the Red Wings. During that weekend in February Larkin was inseparable from the Tkachuk brothers, being seen multiple times together at the Elbo Room, a bar that is now one of the NHL’s top unofficial business gathering places.

Whether you like it or not, it’s a player empowerment play by several of the members of Team USA, and there are some general managers better suited to handle this new landscape than others.

I know some people have called Larkin soft for this, and it certainly doesn’t help that he filmed a toiler paper commercial around the Olympics, but I actually push back against that a little bit.

It’s a greedy request, sure, but it’s one of the more brave things Larkin has done in his career. He grew up with Red Wings history and what it means to the Michigan hockey community. He saw what happened with Sergei Fedorov who finally was welcomed home and had his number retired this season after decades of being blacklisted by Red Wings ownership.

The safe, soft play for Larkin was to remain in Detroit. Even if he was frustrated with Yzerman and they didn’t get along, the reality is players and GM don’t have to interact on the day-to-day, they don’t have to like each other, and while snippets of malcontent would come out, ultimately Larkin could have ridden this out for five years as hometown hero, the local kid who lived out the dream of every Michigan youth hockey player to captain his hometown team.

Instead he asked to move on, he asked to go play second fiddle somewhere, essentially admitting in his request that he can’t be and isn’t the focal point of a championship team. He’s a top-six center in the NHL, probably somewhere in the 20 to 30ish range for me if I were ranking them, but he’s not the guy to lead a team to a championship down the middle.

It’s brave to admit that and it’s also brave to throw away the hometown legacy and become a villain.

To be clear, this isn’t to defend Larkin’s decision one way or the other. But I think we are missing the point if we call him soft or anything like that. Red Wings fan can, and maybe they should, call him a villain, but this is more devious than cowardice in my view.

There’s also the reality that Yzerman may not trade him. If you are in Yzerman’s shoes, and I think it’s pretty well known if his name wasn’t “Steve Yzerman” he’d have been fired by now after seven missed postseasons, why would you trade Larkin for a weak return?

It’ll be awkward if Larkin is still on the roster come September, but unless you are able to get an acceptable trade package, why would you just gift a shutdown second-line center, who can score a point per game, to an NHL contender?

It’s also a two-front battle for Yzerman. One to find the best return for his soon-to-be ex-captain, and one with Larkin to whittle him down to make that trade list as large as possible.

From a Red Wings perspective, it’s going to be a redefining trade, a legacy defining one. As someone who is actively working on a book on team history for young readers (elementary school-aged reading level), it’s incredibly frustrating timing since I had just finished up the first draft of the manuscript about a month ago thinking Larkin wouldn’t be going anywhere.

In that mindset, for the Red Wings and Larkin, there’s still a lot to be written and in my book’s case, re-written, over the next couple weeks and months. Maybe the NHL Draft pushes the tempo for this, it’s an ideal time to move assets, or maybe this drags on further into the summer. Either way, it’s something that is going to define this NHL offseason.