Situational awareness is essential when you’re talking about the context surrounding any topic. It offers you the ability to generate sympathy for an opinion or to support an argument based upon what you know about the wider scope of what you’re trying to discuss.
As much as I like the Hockey News’s Ryan Lambert, I believe that his situational awareness is lacking a bit in suggesting that the Red Wings’ next general manager and/or president of hockey operations must trade Alex DeBrincat as soon as he or she takes the reins of Detroit’s hockey franchise:
3. Trade Alex DeBrincat
If you’re accepting that you have to trade Larkin, then why on earth would you keep DeBrincat, a pending UFA who scores boatloads of goals and can only veto a trade to half the league?
The odds that he wants to return to Detroit at the end of this contract have to be extremely low, so you might as well face facts and move on. This doesn’t have to be a training-camp deal, by any means, but if he’s still on the team around the holiday roster freeze, that seems like a bit of mismanagement.
He’s a very good player who can help just about any team, but look at where the Red Wings have gotten with his help for his entire tenure, despite the fact that he has 107 goals over the last three seasons.
And unlike Larkin, the lack of complete control over his destination leave you open to let teams either consider him a pure rental, or find a landing spot that he’s amenable to beyond this season. It doesn’t hurt to put some lines in the water.
But his stuff is here. His wife, his kids, his parents, his home town, the franchise he wanted to play for. As Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff suggested earlier this summer, it’s hard to believe that DeBrincat will simply “want out” when this is the team that he asked to be traded to because he wanted to “go home.”
Don’t get me wrong, DeBrincat could always want to move on to the next big thing, but there’s been no indication of discomfort with the team as of yet, and until we learn otherwise, “he seems happy here” is the prevailing theory.
Lambert continues, suggesting that the next GM and/or president of hockey operations needs to both re-sign Simon Edvinsson (yep!) and simply “cut bait” on Dylan Larkin and trade him for whatever return is out there (not necessarily!) …
Any new hire is probably going to get some leeway to remake the roster in their preferred style, and while there are certainly leftover Yzerman-engineered contracts that will be tough to move, DeBrincat and Larkin clearly aren’t among them.
Ship ’em both out, announce your bold new vision for the future, and accept that there’s going to be at least another couple years of darkness before the light.
That’s not necessarily how the new GM has to work. He or she (yes, it could be a “she” in 2026) probably won’t want to burn the franchise down to the foundation just for the sake of resetting everything, and simply suggesting that Larkin and DeBrincat should be dumped to the highest bidder, even if the return isn’t great…
Isn’t the most situationally aware suggestion.
