This morning, The Athletic’s Sean McIndoe plays “contrarian,” answering reader questions with contrary answers for the hell of it.
McIndoe facetiously answers a question about the Red Wings’ disgruntled captain, but there are grains of truth throughout his parody:
Dylan Larkin quit on the Red Wings. — Matthew G.
On the contrary, Matthew, you pillock. The only thing Dylan Larkin quit on is denial and delusion. And all he’s guilty of is being realistic.
Specifically, being realistic about whether the Red Wings can win anything as currently constructed. Which they obviously can’t.
I mean, look at the teams around the league that are having success. The Avalanche won the Presidents’ Trophy with Nathan MacKinnon as their top center. The Panthers won back-to-back Cups with Sasha Barkov. The Oilers went to back-to-back finals with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, then the Golden Knights went with Jack Eichel. Even the Hurricanes, a championship team with no good players, are built around a consistent point-per-game center in Sebastian Aho who also finished in the top 10 of Selke voting. If you want to contend in the NHL, it all starts with having an elite center or two.
Now look at the Red Wings. Sure, they have a Norris-caliber defenseman, a 40-goal guy on the wing, and some intriguing young pieces. But their first-line center? That guy stinks! He hasn’t topped 70 points in three years, he’s never had a single Hart or postseason All-Star vote in his life, and he disappears down the stretch every year when they need him most.
You can’t win with a guy like that. And unlike Steve Yzerman, Dylan Larkin is realistic enough to know that. That makes him smarter than many Red Wings fans, who’ve spent years pretending they had an elite guy to build around when they clearly didn’t.
Not Larkin. He took a good hard look at the roster and reached the only logical conclusion: This team’s first-line center is an overrated bum. You can’t win that way, he knows it, and he doesn’t want to be a part of the futility of trying. Instead of calling him names, we should all be giving him credit for his steely-eyed realism.
Continued; McIndoe is joking in suggesting that the Red Wings’ lack of a first-line center is the team’s biggest problem, but the argument that Larkin isn’t quite good enough for the Red Wings to contend has been “out there” for a long time now.
Is it true? That’s a question for somebody else. I’ve always felt that Larkin “is a #1C,” even if he wasn’t exactly elite elite, because he’s a great skater, he drives play, competes and scores clutch goals…
But no, he’s not Sasha Barkov, Nathan MacKinnon, etc. He’s not necessarily elite, though he is a #1 center for trade purposes–maybe not “elite elite,” but at least as complete a player as there is out there–and that means that he’s the best guy on the market in my opinion.
The Red Wings don’t have superstars in their system other than DeBrincat, Raymond and Seider, and their center depth is something that the team’s going to have to address going forward through either a trade or a free agent signing, especially when Larkin leaves the team.
I still believe that Marco Kasper’s going to rebound from his difficult sophomore season, I think that Nate Danielson is better than projected, but if you head over to EliteProspects and look at the Red Wings’ depth chart, there are a ton of potentially good centers in the pipeline…
And then there are Andrew Copp and J.T. Compher and Michael Rasmussen, and while Emmitt Finnie is best-suited to playing as a forechecking winger, he can play center.
So how do the Red Wings replace Larkin, or import an upgrade through a trade? I don’t have those kinds of answers, regrettably, and I don’t know if the Red Wings have those answers yet, either.
