Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff suggests that disgruntled Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin will attending training camp and play for his current team if Larkin is not traded by mid-September:
He has 8.7 million reasons not to pursue this tack. That’s what the Red Wings will be paying Larkin this season – $8.7 million.
He’s not going to give the team a reason not to pay him that money. And a holdout seeking to force the team’s hand into trading him more quickly would only play into the team’s hands.
If Larkin were to withhold his services, it would allow management not to pay Larkin all that money. The Red Wings could simply suspend Larkin for refusing to honor his contract.
You can call Larkin a lot of things, and certainly, a definitive portion of the Red Wings faithful has applied a plethora of colorful adjectives to Larkin’s name this summer.
One thing you can’t call him is foolish. And he’d have to be a fool to take this course of action.
Larkin has to have figured out that he’ll feel the wrath of the faithful if he’s in the lineup when the team takes the ice for its first game of the NHL season. That wrath would only ramp up if he were to hold out and have to sheepishly come back with his tail between his legs if the Red Wings still weren’t able to trade him.
Continued; I had hoped that the Red Wings will trade Larkin by the start of training camp, or that he would hold out and stay home, so that the negative environment around him doesn’t spread to the Wings’ locker room, but it does appear that he’ll show up for training camp at this moment.
I simply question whether the Wings will reach a reconciliation with their unhappy captain at some point, or whether he’ll still be traded.
