Detroit — Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin is in his seventh NHL season. He’s missed the playoffs in all but one of them.
Both this year and the last, he’s had to deal with that disappointment in the official role of team leader. It’s wearing on him.
“Yeah, I take it personally. This is — it’s brutal, you know?” he said after Sunday’s 6-1 loss to the Florida Panthers, the team’s second blowout defeat in as many days.
“I’ve been here all six years (that the team has missed playoffs) and it’s no fun packing your bag at the end of the year, going to play in World Championships or do whatever. It just isn’t,” Larkin added.
“You want to play playoff hockey.”
It’s tough to count on two hands the number of times Larkin has stepped to the podium and uttered some variation of these same words over the last three seasons.
Outside of Larkin, Jakub Vrana — the only active Red Wing with a Stanley Cup ring — and Tyler Bertuzzi, Detroit’s roster makeup is mainly a mix of guys who have either been chasing team success for 10-plus years, and guys who haven’t been around long enough to much know what they’re missing in the Red Wings’ now six-year playoff drought.
“We’ve got a lot of guys in here that haven’t been through this, but you’ve gotta remember it,” Larkin said. “You gotta take it in and put it on yourself to have a great year next year, and make sure this doesn’t happen again. It can’t happen much longer.”
There was a time early on in this Red Wings season where it seemed as though a majority of their success could be attributed to the youthful energy that was injected into the roster. As a whole, the team was playing loose — and it was yielding positive results.
But there’s a sort of uncertain energy in most of their appearances since the All-Star break. They’re 9-16-4 in that stretch. Following Saturday’s game, Larkin said the youth may be starting to catch up with them a bit.
“We’re a young team, we go back for pucks and we throw them away a lot of times, and we don’t talk for our partner,” Larkin said Saturday. “We have to go back, we have to work on communicating and talking our way out of problems.”
When the Red Wings are matched up with the league’s best, their commitment to defending leaves little room for playing free. The opposition’s attack can bully Detroit into submission. And then, impatience settles in.
“It’s not totally youth; part of it is on some of our guys that have been around,” Blashill rebutted after Saturday’s loss. “It’s talk, for sure, but it’s just understanding not to force things. If you’ve got plays to make, make them. If you don’t, live another day. It’s been something that ultimately we’re going to need to learn in order to become a better hockey team, and we haven’t done a good enough job of learning that lesson.”
That likely means Larkin, at times, but with 25 points in 29 games since the All-Star break, he’s in the back of the line of players deserving blame. And let’s be honest: A minus-45 goal differential in the back half of the season doesn’t point to any one issue, but rather a collective of them.
“It’s a challenge, and we have to be up for it or else it’s going to be like tonight and against New York,” Larkin said, referencing the 4-0 loss to the Rangers on Saturday in which the Red Wings were at a 17-3 shot disadvantage after 20 minutes.
“We don’t create much, we don’t have fun playing with the puck. We have to challenge ourselves. We have to challenge ourselves. I’ve said it a lot, but someone can’t push you out the door like it’s minor hockey and give you candy after the game. You have to take pride in this, and you have to take pride in wearing the winged wheel, and go out there and fight for a job next year.”
“Fun” — it’s a concept Larkin has talked about a few times this season.
While he surely wants to alleviate the pressure of being the face of a once-proud franchise that’s spun its wheels for the better part of a decade, he’s also been around long enough to know that “fun” comes with confidence, which typically goes hand-in-hand with winning.
The Red Wings have just six more games to find that this year. There isn’t much to play for in the grand scheme, although Larkin seems to disagree.
He’s adamant about making this season feel like one where the Red Wings saw progress — rather than being a different variation of the same team that’s missed the playoffs in six straight seasons.
“You have to find that yourself. It doesn’t just come, you have to find it,” Larkin said. “We play great teams, let’s go out and give it our best. You saw it at Carolina, you see it at times.
“We need to see it every night.”
Nolan Bianchi is a freelance writer.