I don’t often agree with the Hockey News’s Ryan Lambert, but, this evening, Lambert suggests that the Dylan Larkin press conference was far from satisfactory to the people who pay Larkin’s salary, and he’s 100% right here:
Unless there’s some real family-related stuff at play, like there seems to be with Connor Hellebuyck in Winnipeg, these answers just don’t cut it. Hellebuyck has at least obliquely referred to the fact that he doesn’t think the Winnipeg Jets can be competitive. So if that was the impetus for Larkin’s request as well, then he should say so.
That could be interpreted as saying he thinks his teammates aren’t good enough, collectively, and after a decade of playoff misses, you would think that’s just undeniable. NHL players know when their teams aren’t good and they know why, so if Larkin did say he doesn’t think he can win in Detroit, there’s not a guy in that room who could honestly say they don’t get it.
And if it was an Yzerman thing after all? Well, he isn’t his boss anymore. You don’t want to rock the boat with one of the league’s all-time greats, but if everyone understands that behind the scenes, then what’s the harm in saying that publicly?
Players and coaches and GMs don’t get along sometimes, as Larkin alluded to, but if their rift was so strong that he requested a trade, you owe it to the fans to say so. But since he’s not commenting on whether the trade request has been rescinded, all anyone on the outside can do is wonder.
Even forgetting that Larkin is a local product who grew up a Red Wings fan, he’s played there 11 years. You would think he understands how the business works by now.
Fans buy your jerseys, buy tickets, cheer you on. Players are not obligated to take less money than they deserve to stay with one team forever, and as far as anyone should be concerned, they can request a trade anytime they want for any reason they want.
But when it’s a situation like this, explanations are owed. It’s that simple. Leaving it shrouded in mystery like this is a half-way solution that, based on social media chatter in the immediate aftermath, seems to have only frustrated people more.
If he wasn’t going to answer why he requested a trade — the only thing anyone really wanted to hear from him today — then he shouldn’t have had the press conference. But since he did appear in front of media, even if he was told by the team that he had to, he should have been forthright.
Continued; being forthright doesn’t appear to be “the Red Wing way” these days, which is disappointing.
Maybe we’ll find out what Larkin truly was thinking when he asked for a trade, and what he was thinking when he had to appear in front of the press today, some day in the future. Maybe we won’t.
All I know is that today’s presser was essentially a waste of time, in my humble opinion, and that’s a rare one for me.
