97.1 the Ticket’s Will Burchfield filed an article discussing Dylan Larkin’s need for a bounce-back season this year:
You can view last year for Larkin any way you like. The simplest assessment is the truth: it wasn’t good enough. Larkin crashed offensively and created more questions than he answered in Detroit’s search for a No. 1 center. The search was all but over when last season began. It resumes in earnest Thursday night.
“Certainly for Dylan, there’s lots on his shoulders as a young captain of a team that’s going through a rebuild,” Jeff Blashill said Thursday morning. “We’ve faced a number of hard times and that’s not easy. But he’s an extraordinary young person — or really at this point, an extraordinary guy who’s been in the league now for seven years.”
Seven years — it’s hard to fathom. Larkin just turned 25. Then you remember the faces who were here when his was fresh — Pavel Datsyuk and Johan Franzen, for two — and seven years feels right. Back then, Larkin was the whirling winger under the wing of a franchise great. He scored goals, Henrik Zetterberg took care of the rest. Now the rest belongs to Larkin. He’s the shepherd for Raymond, the center who counters the opposition’s best, the player who leads his team onto the ice.
“He has to go out and win a ton of puck battles, he has to be dynamic with his skating and he has to be responsible defensively,” said Blashill.
