Jason_R

Oof… he’s going to start the season with them and get booed into oblivion before the first road trip.

Learning he is as dumb as a rock answers so many questions.

Larkin returning will be like a dad bringing his new wife to a family gathering. Everybody will just have to smile and grit their teeth until the 2027 trade deadline when hopefully the charade will be over for good.

If he does come back, at a bare minimum, he will have to do an interview to clear the air with fans. I think you are right that a lot of fans, and probably even most, will forget about this after the first goal. But some people will hold the grudge forever.

Could just be coincidence but it seems like Brisson put a PR campaign in place to try to force the trade. Wouldn’t we also expect him to put a PR campaign in place to help set expectations regarding Larkin’s likely return?

Yes, both sides have played this badly. Yzerman lost his job because he couldn’t get along with his team’s most important player. Larkin gave an idiotic ultimatum that his agent should never have allowed to get public. Larkin will need to make the heel turn. Fans will fill his ears with boos. He will need to learn to draw energy from this.

In the past few days I’ve seen or heard probably half a dozen NHL pundits say they expect Larkin to start the season in Detroit. Maybe he won’t. Maybe Chris will hire someone and give him another three years of runway and permission to ship Larkin out for picks. I don’t think that will happen but it might. But don’t be surprised if Larkin is there on the first day of camp. Assuming Larkin comes back, he’ll have to get used to playing the villain. Frankly, he has needed a bit more villain in his game. What would happen if he comes back and decides he doesn’t need to be liked, he just wants to win, and he starts playing with a little more ferocity and edge? I’d like to see him spear a guy like Jamie Benn, for instance, and I think his teammates and the fans would appreciate this too.

What is more likely: Larkin has no other workout gear than his Red Wings gear and just happened to post a video of himself working out in his Red Wings gear a few days after his GM-nemesis got fired, with no thought or awareness of how that might be perceived? Or Larkin, who is on a multi-million dollar contract that he wants to collect on, has an agent who told him the trade demand hasn’t worked out and Detroit may be your only option so our PR team is going to start a strategy to rebuild the bridge we burned?

🤔

The new guard will not be hired independently of the Larkin question. In fact, it is unthinkable that Chris has no opinion on the matter, and it is unthinkable that he would hire someone who sees the situation differently. If it is the case that Chris fired Stevie in an effort to keep Larkin, you better believe he is not hiring someone who thinks he’s coming in to trade Larkin.

Had they not collapsed again last year, we all would have been happy with the Faulk trade. He also promises to solidify the second defensive pairing this season. I was listening to the NHL network on SiriusXM radio earlier and the host said “we all assume that Larkin is going to start the season in Detroit.” I think he is right. And I don’t think there is any way that he holds out and gives up his $8 million salary. The most likely scenario now, it seems, is that they will replace Patrick Kane with Arvidson and will bolster their bottom six with some of the kids from Grand Rapids, but Larkin will still be centering the top line. If Larkin really wants to get traded, he is going to have to put up numbers until the trade deadline. Who knows, everything could break their way this season and the new GM may get the green light to buy at the trade deadline. More likely, they will get to the deadline and unload Larkin and Faulk and Gibson and maybe DeBrincat.

Well when you put it like that…

I haven’t heard anything about interviews yet. The clock is ticking.

Leaving aside the Larkin bombshell, I understood at the time why he gave Stevie one more year. But it seems like everybody in the NHL knew that Larkin and Yzerman were not on speaking terms. There were also other signs of something toxic in the culture. It is alarming in retrospect that Chris did not act on these things, or even know them, sooner. There is also an element of this where Chris backed himself into a corner. with you start to let Stevie turn through coaches, you are tacitly buying into the argument that coaching is the issue, and not roster construction.

Nobody knows what happened behind the scenes but it seems like Chris fired him as soon as he made the decision he needed to be fired. Had Larkin demanded a trade the day after the season, I assume Chris would have approached the offseason differently. But Larkin’s awkward decision to demand a trade at an awkward time resulted in an awkward timing of Stevie’s firing. I assume that Chris saw things spinning out of control just like the rest of us did, getting blindsided by the trade request and then not seeing any clear path forward from it. He just decided he needed to act, and he acted as soon as he made the decision.

It is one thing to say he is remaining in the role during the search, it would be another thing to allow him to make binding decisions, which I’m sure is not going to happen.

Lots of different people can be sources. The things HSJ has reported seem like they are coming from Stevie or his allies. Maybe his brother? But I don’t buy for a second that getting punted upstairs was Stevie’s idea. He’s had to answer questions about three late season collapses in a row. Then he had to answer for Dylan’s trade demand. When the Larkin situation wasn’t resolved at the draft, and Chris realized it may last into the season, and when he started to see that Stevie himself was a barrier to getting it resolved, and was maybe even a barrier to adding outside talent, he made the decision, even though the timing was awkward.

Tell us how it works then.

Yes, my point was that I assume Stevie was telling Ilitch that he had done all he could to put the team over the hump but placed blame on the team when they failed to make the playoffs. I agree that these were the players that Stevie chose and that this argument rings hollow. Ultimately Chris came to feel the same way. I hope Chris hires a senior executive to help establish a cohesive culture throughout the organization, and then hires one of the talented, up-and-coming AGM candidates who is heavy on analytics. Then let your GM build an entire analytics operation and rebuild the scouting staff.

It is strange and alarming that the change occurred as late as it did. If the whole NHL knew that Yzerman and Larkin were on the outs, you have to think Ilitch knew also. OTOH everyone in the NHL was surprised by the number of Team USA players who started to call their shots. Before Larkin’s demand, it was possible to imagine that a few tweaks and some internal growth could get the team into the playoffs. After, that was wildly optimistic at best. You have to think that Ilitch was pressing Stevie about the franchise’s direction well before Larkin”s announcement and Stevie was saying we are right on the edge, but the players collapsed. Larkin forced Ilitch to accelerate those conversations. I assume the front office has been scrambling since the Larkin announcement. Stevie must have been too slow or stubborn to chart an to chart a new course and Chris decided it was time to move on.

I have wondered this same thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7448030/2026/07/16/detroit-red-wings-general-manager-candidates-steve-yzerman/ Max Bultman has thoughts, with good detail on some quant-heavy candidates. Also observes (rightly in my view) that Shanahan is better as candidate for a senior executive role if one is created to buffer a first-time GM. But not as GM.

There’s a good summary on Reddit of Ansar Khan’s appearance on a podcast to discuss the Yzerman situation. I’m stealing some of the summary. Ilitch family is big into analytics as evidenced by Scott Harris hire. Khan expects an outside hire. Larkin and Yzerman have clashed for a long time, probably since Yzerman made Larkin wait to become captain. Khan says Yzerman was “very irked” by Larkin’s comments about no help at the trade deadline and felt that Larkin “embarrassed” him.

Yes. That first paragraph was a summary of Friedman’s comments but I agree.