A couple of days ago, I posted this on the platform formerly known as Twitter, mostly amused in the Alanis Morissette sense of the term “ironic,” a.k.a. “darkly funny.”
Just an FYI (and I will write about this soon):
— George Malik (@georgemalik) June 12, 2026
There is another parallel between Sergei Fedorov's divorce from the Wings in 2003 and Dylan Larkin's impending exit from Detroit in 2026:
Pat Brisson. He was Fedorov's agent. He is Larkin's agent.
Take that for what you will.
You really can interpret this post as you will. Pat Brisson has been one of the NHL’s most prolific and powerful agents over the course of the last 30 years, representing everyone from Mario Lemieux, Fedorov and Sidney Crosby to people like Dylan Larkin, Quinn Hughes and dozens of others.
Some of Brisson’s clients have been shepherded through the ask-for-a-trade and/or “sign elsewhere” process; other clients have remained with their employers throughout the duration of their contracts, and have even spent their entire careers with one organization.
I don’t know whether having the same agent is the reason that Larkin is divorcing the Red Wings, which still strikes me as quite similar to Fedorov’s decision to walk away from Detroit after both his 1998 holdout and the 2003 free agency dispute with Mike Ilitch’s management team.
I just know that it’s out there, as a data point, and that it’s really effing ironic, perhaps in the Alanis Morissette sense of the term. It’s not THE REASON why Larkin is asking for a trade, but it’s certainly worth noting.
I do know that Brisson is the reason that people like Pierre LeBrun, the Free Press’s Helene St. James and the Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan (among others) were able to corroborate Elliotte Friedman’s initial report that Larkin had asked Detroit for a trade to the release of Larkin’s “short list” of destinations, as well as the possibility of adding new teams to the list.
Why? Because the Red Wings’ management team simply does not speak with the media until Steve Yzerman decides that it’s time to hold a press conference, and Larkin’s an unlikely source as a disgruntled party, too. The information has to be coming from somewhere, and it’s likely Brisson who’s sharing these nuggets of joy with the Wings’ beat writers and some carefully chosen genuine “insiders.”
As you know by now, Larkin’s request to leave Detroit has become the biggest story not involving the Stanley Cup Final in the NHL these days. Hundreds of pages’ worth of digital content have been hashing and re-hashing the situation as almost every team’s media corps has wondered whether Larkin might be a “fit” with their team, podcasts and sports talk radio are abuzz with speculation, and so much of it is simply tossing out bullshit in order to get clicks that it’s incredibly aggravating.
We do know that it’s gotten out that Larkin and GM Steve Yzerman were, at the very least, not on the same page in terms of their desires to shape the future of the Red Wings’ roster, and we do know that this “frosty relationship” has metastasized into a cancerous situation. There’s real rancor here, and that dissatisfaction has, for better or worse, yielded the Red Wings’ captain to request a trade from his hometown team.
We also know that this situation probably won’t play itself out until after one of Larkin’s favored destinations, the Vegas Golden Knights, finish their playoff run…And it’s incredibly difficult to believe that the Wings’ management team won’t “kick the tires” (to use a Ken Holland term) of the Carolina Hurricanes to see whether they’re interested in Larkin, too.
The “smart money” suggests that Larkin is going to be moved either on or around the NHL Draft on June 26th, the start of free agency on July 1st…Or, quite possibly, sometime later this summer, or even this fall. It’s still reasonable to suggest that Larkin might “hold out” during training camp, or even have to play as a disgruntled player this upcoming October.
The ways in which a trade could play out have also been widely discussed, too. Detroit could ask for “help right now” to assuage the loss of Larkin as the team’s default #1 center. The Wings may ask for a player, prospect and 1st round draft pick as a standard request. They might ask for “futures” (as in prospects and picks only). And the Wings may very well “flip” part or all of the assets they receive to a 3rd team to more meaningfully address Larkin’s departure.
Detroit could also pull off a secondary trade of their own (hello, Elias Pettersson?) to more meaningfully replace Larkin after having taken one of the above-mentioned combinations of NHL roster players, prospects and picks.
What I do know about this situation is that, 23 years ago, Sergei Fedorov’s divorce from the Red Wings’ organization through free agency…Was far messier than this divorce through a trade request. I know because I wasn’t just paying attention to the American media sources as Fedorov’s exit developed as contract negotiations broke down in early July; I know because I was reading the Russian reports from Sport-Express and Sovetsky Sport, plugged into the best online translator at the time, PROMT.
In the American media, Fedorov’s desire to leave Detroit got pretty heated as fans speculated as to what was going on, but it wasn’t rancorous.
In the Russian media, however, Sergei’s dad, Viktor Fedorov, was spouting off directly to Sport-Express’s late Igor Larin, insisting that Sergei was misunderstood, under-utilized to under his full potential by North American coaches who didn’t accept how special Sergei was, etc. etc.
Now there’s no doubt that Fedorov’s decision to sign an offer sheet with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2008 and then hold out until the Red Wings signed him was the situation that planted the seed for his divorce from the team, but the summer of 2003 was a very vicious follow-on as Fedorov’s chose, with the help of his agent, to sign a 5-year, $40 million contract with the Ducks.
That’s where the details get tricky, and where “hockey lore” comes into play.
Per the Russian press, Sergei and Viktor (mostly Viktor) insisted that the Red Wings had placed a 5-year, $35 million offer on the table, agreed to it one day, and, suddenly, the team pulled their offer away at the last minute, forcing Sergei’s hand.
According to the Red Wings (through a ton of innuendo), Fedorov had agreed to sign the offer, and chose to leave for Anaheim despite a promise to remain in Detroit.
The rancor and fury from this contentious situation played out in Sport-Express and Sovetsky Sport for the remainder of the summer, with Viktor insisting to Igor Larin that his son had been betrayed by the Red Wings’ organization. His son was the victim of a nasty trick played by the Ilitches, Ken Holland and Jimmy Devellano. As such, Sergei had no choice but to sign with the Ducks, who would rightly utilize Sergei as their #1 center.
Very little of this information got out to the Detroit media corps, because few people were actually reading the Russian sports stories at the time, and, over on this side of the Atlantic, Fedorov and his agent bore the outrage of the Red Wings’ fan base (and ownership).
We all know what happened after that. It took until 2026 for the Wings to retire the number of a player who retired in 2013, and while Fedorov’s appearance at the alumni games ahead of the 2014 Winter Classic began a rehabilitation process, his relationship with the Wings’ ownership and management remained “frosty” until something changed in 2025, and the team decided to finally retire his number.
Dylan Larkin won’t be afforded the same luxury. He’s leaving the team by “asking out” after 11 seasons with Detroit, and he’s leaving with the bulk of his 8-year, $69.6 million contract unfinished.
And while the Wings’ management tends to run like a nuclear submarine–it “runs silent, runs deep” and doesn’t leak, period–we all can imagine that Yzerman and the Wings’ management team (and the ownership) are less than thrilled that the hometown captain has asked to leave for greener pastures.
I don’t believe that we’re going to see a “Buffalo 2.0” situation, as David Pagnotta and Jeff Marek called the Wings’ future, where Detroit will be forced to trade Alex DeBrincat and essentially “restart the rebuild.”
The Wings are too far deep into their current iteration of Steve Yzerman’s rebuilding process, and, while the team may take a step back this upcoming season, the team’s not going to waste the careers of future captain Moritz Seider or alternate captain Lucas Raymond for the sake of resetting what could be another 8-to-10-year process.
The players won’t buy in, and I doubt that coach Todd McLellan, whose job hangs upon avoiding a 3rd straight March collapse, would buy into that scenario, either.
The team basically can’t be charging as much as it is for tickets, concessions and parking without making a genuine effort to move forward, too, even though there’s no doubt that it will be worse off without their #1 center.
It is highly unlikely that whatever offer the Red Wings accept for Larkin won’t include the “best player right now”–that’s Larkin, and he’s exiting, stage left.
Finally, there are some elephants in the room to address.
First, these situations are different. We don’t have a third source in which Larkin’s dad is telling the media what his son might feel about this imminent(?) divorce, and as Larkin is as tight-lipped as his soon-to-be-former GM regarding his personal motivations, I don’t know whether we’re ever going to find out why exactly Larkin asked to leave when he joins his future employer.
Second, Larkin is obviously asking “out” while under contract, and, at 29, while he’s still just cresting over the prime of his career, and that’s not how Fedorov walked away from Detroit.
Third…
Whatever the hell you want to believe about the “Olympic chats” with players like Matthew Tkachuk and Quinn Hughes, the post-Olympic gold medal-winning parties, etc. etc., we can speculate that something changed during or after the Olympics…
Because Larkin followed up his extremely strong performance in Milan with a thoroughly mediocre performance down the NHL’s stretch run, especially at even strength. Something appears to have changed, whether that’s in terms of motivation, injuries, or an accumulation of both…
But there’s no excuse for the drop-off in the soon-to-be former captain’s performance when the Red Wings needed him the most, and that helped contribute to the Wings’ second Spring Collapse as they plummeted down the standings with loss after loss.
Now Larkin is asking for a trade from the team he’s captained for over half a decade, and he’s asking “out” of his hometown organization, and there’s got to be a significant reason for doing so.
Whether his agent is involved with Larkin’s decision-making process is hard to say, but, again, I would speculate that it’s hard to imagine that Brisson is not serving as counsel to Larkin through this decision-making process, even if this entire situation was Larkin’s idea.
Bottom line, this situation isn’t nearly as contentious or downright mean as Sergei Fedorov’s departure from Detroit through free agency in 2003, but there are enough simple parallels in terms of the player’s wishes that my “spidey sense” is tingling with curiosity to find out answers about this situation that probably won’t ever be revealed in public. Dylan Larkin’s situation is different from Fedorov’s, and the one through-line is the presence of one of the NHL’s most powerful agents in the mix.
As the NHL’s press corps continues to speculate and spew endless missives and articles speculating where Larkin’s going, how Larkin got here, and why he arrived at his decision-making process, I’d only kindly suggest that you skip the translated Russian…
And I’d ask you to be at least patient enough to wait for official reports over speculative websites who are only looking for your clicks via sensational headlines. The actual beat writers and “insiders” have nothing to prove, other than that they can provide genuine scoops and story lines. There’s so much digital ink being spilled over Larkin’s destination and motives right now that it’s silly, and so very little of it is genuinely pertinent to the real narrative.
Of that, I have no doubt, regardless of whether Pat Brisson is involved in crafting the story.
Let’s hope that this situation resolves itself sooner than later. I can readily imagine this saga taking all summer to reach its conclusion, and I think that it’s at least a real possibility, though remote, that Larkin will have to hold out or play as a disgruntled skater for his soon-to-be former employer this fall.
Right now, we just have to wait and see, and we just have to accept that there is far more going on with Larkin than we’ll ever know. We have to accept that not knowing and not speculating baselessly are more realistic in terms of expending our time, energy and emotional investment in “our team,” too…
Because this divorce is already going to be painful enough. There’s no reason to make it worse due to clicking on the clickbait-y stuff that’s designed to do nothing more than get a rise out of us.
Because that’s as ironic as assuming that Larkin’s sole motivation for asking for a trade is the coincidental nature of his agent also being Sergei Fedorov’s one-time counsel.
That’s just a spooky coincidence. Probably, anyway.
