The Malik Report

MLive’s Ansar Khan places his ear to the hockey rumor-y railroad track and offers an update on Patrick Kane’s status this afternoon:

The Detroit Red Wings made a big push to re-sign Patrick Kane and have a standing offer on the table. But it doesn’t appear as if the future Hall-of-Famer will return.

Kane enjoyed his time in Detroit and likes the chemistry he has with longtime linemate Alex DeBrincat. But Dylan Larkin’s likely departure has prompted Kane to seek a better opportunity to win elsewhere.

His hometown Buffalo Sabres appear to be the most logical destination.

Viktor Arvidsson, who can play both wings, should replace Kane’s offense after signing a two-year deal for an average annual value of $5 million on July 1.

But the Red Wings still need more scoring, after ranking 22^nd in goals per game and 30^th in five-on-five goals. And on top of that, there’s no telling what they might get in return for Larkin if he’s traded.

Continued (paywall); as far as I’m concerned, I really do believe that superpower agent Pat Brisson is keeping up some communication between Larkin and Kane, who are both Brisson’s clients.

My realistic “gut feeling” is that Kane’s not making an easy decision between Detroit, Buffalo, and wherever else he may end up, and that the Wings’ roster situation will play heavily into his decision-making process. Otherwise, he would have already signed with the Sabres already:

The Sabres have about $8.6 million in cap space and could use some more offense after losing three-time 30-goal scorer and unrestricted free agent Alex Tuch in a sign-and-trade with Washington.

Buffalo ended a 14-year playoff drought and advanced to the second round before being eliminated by Montreal.

I’m just shaking my head at the admirable Adam Proteau’s off-key take on the situation between disgruntled Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin and Detroit’s players and management.

Proteau wonders aloud what would happen if the Red Wings brought a disgruntled Larkin to training camp, which is not going to happen…

While Yzerman can and should put up a brave front for public consumption and pretend that Larkin is going to play more games in a Red Wings uniform, picture what could happen if Larkin isn’t traded.

When training camp begins, there will be an army of media asking pointed questions. Could the Wings function and focus when, every day, there’ll be constant questions about Larkin’s future in Detroit? 

That potential situation could get sufficiently ugly to be a burden that Red Wings players have no choice but to deal with daily. It will be a constant distraction, and no amount of brave posturing will change the fact that Larkin has checked out.

Larkin knew there was no turning back once he informed Yzerman that he wanted a trade. And there’ll be a poisonous atmosphere in Motown if Larkin sticks around.

There are two points to be made here:

1. Yzerman’s not going to talk to the media until he wants to do so. For better or worse, he’s not a general manager that reaches out to the media, and I have a bad feeling that he’s not going to speak this summer/fall until the Larkin situation rectifies itself. It’s disappointing to have a hermit for a GM in terms of his relationship with the media (or the total lack thereof), but that’s his prerogative;
2. Again, there is no purpose in bringing Larkin to training camp. If he’s still a member of the Red Wings’ organization come September, the Wings should either sit him out or suspend him outright.

And this is why Yzerman should hold out for the best deal possible–because the most well-intentioned journalists just get the whole bloody point of trading Larkin if and only if there’s a commensurate return wrong:

Continue reading The Red Wings should not ‘settle’ for an OK Dylan Larkin trade simply to get it done and over with

EliteProspects/DLLS Sports/Shap Shots’ Sean Shapiro is back from a vacation to Michigan’s U.P., and he’s updated his Substack with thoughts regarding Dallas’ Jason Robertson’s decision to go the salary arbitration route, offering scuttlebutt and behind-the-scenes talk as to how the Dallas Stars’ organization works…

And Shapiro adds this about Dylan Larkin’s situation, reiterating what has become a more and more common theory–that Dylan Larkin’s value has only increased now that Leo Carlsson’s been offered $20 million per season:

On the “hockey is a business” note, the Leo Carlsson signed offer sheet and the Anaheim Ducks pending decision to match the Philadelphia Flyers or not feels like it just juiced up Dylan Larkin’s value.

Larkin was already a highly-desirable asset as a top-six center making $8.7 million per season, but with the rising cap and the Carlsson deal, that cap hit for five more season became even more valuable. Now whether that means he’s more valuable to the Red Wings or more valuable as a trade asset is fascinating, but it feels like this is just another reason to see Steve Yzerman dig in his heels and be more patient than anyone else would like him to be.

Continued (paywall); again, we’re all questioning whether Steve Yzerman should trade while the summertime “gettin’s good,” but I have a feeling that this is going to take all summer to play out.

Now it’s July 6th, and I’m coming out of a burnout-induced sickness haze, but I’m going to post this take on Patrick Kane’s value from Detroit Hockey Now’s Max Smith, and suggest that he may know something that we don’t:

The list of [free agent] names that remain unsigned includes forwards Patrick Kane, James van Riesmdyk, and David Perron alongside defenseman Travis Hamonic and goaltender Cam Talbot. For the Red Wings UFA class, it seems to be a case of trying to read if the winds will be able to carry them where they want to go.

Highlighting the top of the list, of course, is Kane. The mercurial winger is in his age 37 season, and came to Detroit after what could have been a career-ending hip resurfacing surgery hoping to cup chase.

Since then, Detroit has suffered three March collapses and missed the playoffs, while his hometown Buffalo Sabres have finally broken a 14 year playoff drought. Kane cares a lot about his family, and while he did express a desire to return to Detroit in his post season press conferences, that was before Dylan Larkin’s trade request went public.

Re-signing with Detroit could mean more playoff misses, and it’s not like Kane is getting younger, or healthier. Injuries limited 88 to just 67 games, though he still managed 57 points and crossed the 500 career goal mark. There’s certainly a market for Kane, but it seems for the moment that he’s more than willing to let the dust clear a bit more before he makes any decisions about where he plays next season.

Continued; there is a LOT of unofficial speculation that Kane is going to sign with Buffalo, but I’m contending that he may be waiting to see what happens with Dylan Larkin before making his decision. After all, the two players have the same agent in Pat Brisson…

But I guess what raises my eyebrow here is that I’m not sure we’d call Kane “mercurial,” nor would I suggest that he’s brittle. He suffered what was probably a broken wrist in a collision with the end boards and missed a bit chunk of time there.

No, he’s not quite as durable as he was prior to his hip resurfacing procedure, but he’s still 80% of what he used to be, and 80% of Patrick Kane is a hell of a lot better than most players in the NHL.

Earlier this morning, I posted the clip of Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas’ final “32 Thoughts” podcast of the 2025-2026 season, a massive 4-hour bonanza of coverage of each and every one of the NHL’s 32 teams.

At the 1:17 mark, Friedman and Bukauskas discuss the Red Wings, and the Hockey News’s Michael Whitaker reports that Friedman and Bukauskas discuss a logical target with which the Wings could pursue a trade for Dylan Larkin–the Carolina Hurricanes:

Continue reading Friedman, annotated: is there Carolina-Larkin connection?

DetroitRedWings.com’s Jonathan Mills wraps up the team’s coverage of the Wings’ annual Summer Development Camp at Little Caesars Arena with a circumspect review this morning:

Getting a great look at the organization’s next wave of young talent, the Detroit Red Wings concluded their 2026 Development Camp at Little Caesars Arena’s BELFOR Training Center last Thursday.

“At the end of the day, it really is an educational camp where we try to give them everything we can and hopefully, they absorb as much as they can,” Red Wings Assistant Director of Player Development Dan Cleary said. “We have great people here. I just want to say how important it is to have the behind-the-scenes people that make this thing run very smoothly, and I can’t thank everybody enough.”

The Red Wings’ 2026 Development Camp roster consisted of 20 forwards, 11 defensemen and six goaltenders, including the seven new players the club took at the 2026 NHL Entry Draft at KeyBank Center last weekend. Additionally, all eight of the club’s picks from 2025, five from 2024, five from 2023 and two from 2022 were in attendance for the four-day event.

Sure, Development Camp has evolved over the years, but its purpose hasn’t changed: help these young skaters learn, grow and embrace what it means to be part of the organization.

“There’s a bunch of NHL and Detroit legends here that have way more experience than all of us,” Carter Bear said. “We got to listen to them, listen to what they say and what they want us to work on…I think it’s just unreal and pretty cool to have those people around the rink. Seeing what they did with the Detroit Red Wings back then and seeing them now is pretty special.”

Continue reading Article + video: Red Wings wrap up coverage of their Summer Development Camp

This past weekend was not a good one in the TMR household. After a week and-a-half’s worth of 12-to-16 hour shifts behind the laptop, with caregiving added in, I ended up exhausted and sick.

I slept through the vast majority of the weekend, and was so very exhausted that I didn’t even do a decent job of taking care of my aunt, who had a rough weekend herself.

As you might have noticed, TMR went dark as a result, so I would like to get the blog back on track with a roundup of this past weekend’s news.

Let’s do so on a source-by-source basis:

1. We’ll defer to Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff as he offers a Nicklas Lidstrom conversation with Gunnar Nordstrom of Expressen. The two Swedish hockey legends discussed Viktor Arvidsson’s pluses after the free agent forward signed with Detroit on July 1st…

“Our coach [Todd McLellan] had Arvidsson in the LA Kings and knows that he has leadership qualities,” Red Wings vice president of hockey operations Nicklas Lidstrom told reporter Gunnar Nordstrom of Swedish website Expressen. “He will bring that.

“Then he is a player who will go hard on goal and be uncomfortable to face because he competes all the time. He will play among our top six forwards.”

And Lidstrom also spoke about a Red Wings depth signing in 26-year-old forward Wilmer Skoog:

Continue reading Red Wings Catch-Up Post of Doom, Fourth of July Edition

Of Red Wings-related note from Detroit Hockey Now this morning:

1. First, DHN’s Bob Duff reports that former Red Wing Slava Kozlov (who makes his offseason home in Spain of all places) has been hired as an assistant coach for the “Shanghai Dragons” of the KHL

“I was told they were creating a new team, a completely different project,” Kozlov told Russian website Sport-Express. “That intrigued me. There definitely won’t be the chaos we had last year.”

Kozlov took over as coach of Moscow Dynamo when Alexei Kudashov was dismissed in midseason.

Another former Red Wings player, Gerard Gallant, began last season as head coach of the Shanghai Dragons. But the team waited until late in the summer to begin assembling a roster and floundered on the ice.

“What happened last offseason can’t happen again,” Kozlov said. “Both the botched preseason and the long, unsuccessful stretches all had an impact on the final result.

“The team looked poor physically and, after the New Year, stopped competing for a playoff spot.”

Continued, with Duff noting that Martin Frk and Givani Smith are just the latest Red Wings alums to join Chinese-based teams in the KHL recently…

If you can call Shanghai a Chinese-based team. They actually play their home games in St. Petersburg, in Western Europe instead of East Asia, sharing the rink with SKA St. Petersburg.

2. Second, Max Smith discusses the weekend that was in the NHL in “The Daily,” with Smith noting that Patrick Kane has NOT yet found a new home…

Continue reading Three DHN Things: Regarding Slava Kozolov’s kind-of-Chinese adventure; on Patrick Kane the UFA and Simon Edvinsson the RFA

Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas discuss the entire NHL’s 32 teams over the course of a 4-HOUR-LONG “32 Thoughts” podcast today. The gents discuss the Red Wings and the Dylan Larkin situation at 1 hour and 17 minutes, digging into the Dylan Larkin situation:

MLive’s Ansar Khan discusses whether Dylan Larkin or Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman has greater leverage as #71’s trade request drags out into the summer:

Yzerman is not going to be pressured into making a move in which he feels he’s not getting a good return for the face of the franchise. He’s clearly not getting that from any of the three teams on Larkin’s original list of clubs he agreed to waive his no-trade clause to join: Florida, Minnesota and Vegas.

The list has probably been expanded and will grow the longer this standoff goes. It might take a three-way trade for the Detroit captain to land in one of his approved destinations, with Minnesota being the most probable spot.

Larkin’s full no-trade clause at first seemed to give him the leverage.

That’s no longer the case if it ever was in the first place. Yzerman doesn’t seem the type to bluff when he says he’s willing to wait as long as it takes for the right deal. This is a tenure-defining move in a tenure that has fallen way short of expectations. He’s not going to simply take the best offer from a ridiculously short list of approved trade partners if the return doesn’t have the potential to immediately and significantly help this team.

I was doing some thinking overnight before I read Khan’s article, and I figured that this trade would indeed help define whether Yzerman succeeds as the Wings’ GM. I don’t think that’s just hyperbole here…

Continue reading Playing poker with Dylan Larkin and Steve Yzerman