Dylan Larkin deserved to get booed by his own building on opening night. You don't get to ask out of a city, hand over a shopping list of teams you'd rather play for, and then expect a warm hug when your face hits the video board. He asked for a trade in June. The crowd answered in October. That's the deal, and even his coach said as much.
Todd McLellan didn't dress it up afterward. "Dylan being part of the team, he wanted to be out there for the ceremony," McLellan said. "Obviously, he's got to live with the ramifications of asking for a trade. It's not comfortable for anybody; I feel bad for him." The man made a choice, and choices come with a crowd reaction. Fans in a hockey town that hasn't seen the playoffs in a decade don't owe applause to a guy who wants out.
The boos are fair, but the Red Wings put him up there.
He was on injured reserve with an upper-body injury. He wasn't playing. He had no on-ice reason to be in that pregame sequence at all. Detroit introduced him with the inactive players anyway, put him on camera, and let the fans do exactly what everyone expected. Larkin waved and smiled while the arena roared at him. TNT's Paul Bissonnette called the move "bush league" and accused the club of trying to embarrass its own disgruntled star. He's right. You can boo a player for wanting out. You can't pretend the organization that sat on his trade request for months didn't know what it was setting up when it rolled him out as the night's piñata.
After the Rangers went up 1-0 in the first, the chant that filled Little Caesars Arena wasn't really about Larkin anymore: "sell the team," aimed straight at ownership. Within the first six minutes, Detroit had been outshot 6-0, coughed up a power-play goal, and heard its own fans turn on the people signing the checks. Chris Ilitch got heckled in his own arena. That crowd knows who's responsible for this mess. It's the people running the franchise, not the injured center who had no business being paraded out there in the first place.
Larkin asked out. Elliotte Friedman reported ownership refused to move him for anything short of immediate help, even after Steve Yzerman warned them a trade probably wouldn't look good in the short term. Then they fired Yzerman in July, didn't replace him with a permanent GM, stripped Larkin of the captaincy before the season, and named an interim boss in September. They lost Patrick Kane to Chicago in free agency on top of it. A franchise that has missed the playoffs for ten straight years decided the best use of opening night was to let its paying customers scream at a man it couldn't figure out how to trade.
The final insult was the game itself. Detroit actually outshot New York 23-21 and still lost 2-0, shut out in a season opener for only the sixth time in the club's 101 years. Sean Durzi scored in the first, Eeli Tolvanen capped it with an empty-netter. It was a historically bad night on top of a self-inflicted circus.
So boo Larkin, sure. He signed up for it the day his agent made that call. But the venom in that building was pointed in the wrong direction. The people who couldn't get him out the door, then propped him up to be jeered, are the reason this team is a punchline.
