Dylan Larkin does not deserve credit for playing hard while actively trying to force his way out of Detroit, and the man handing him that credit knows it better than anyone. Shawn Horcoff is Detroit's interim GM. His job this week is to keep a trade market from collapsing. Telling the truth about why Larkin refused to play isn't on his to-do list.
Horcoff said it plainly on Thursday: "I've got to give Dylan a lot of credit -- he went out and played hard for us. Dylan's been here for 12 years. With the teams on his list, a trade is difficult." That's a GM protecting an asset. Horcoff needs Larkin's trade value intact, and needs this to look like a cordial business dispute. It's a walkout. Of course he's complimentary in public. A GM who trashes a player he's trying to trade is a GM nobody will deal with.
The "played hard" line falls apart the moment it leaves his mouth. The praise describes a few weeks of a saga that's been running since June, and it stopped being true hours before Horcoff said it. The Red Wings suspended Larkin without pay on Thursday after he told the organization he would no longer play for it. His agent, Pat Brisson, summed it up: "Dylan's had enough of the situation." That's a man who stayed in trade-market shape right up until the deal didn't come fast enough, then stopped being a hockey player altogether. Right now it's open-ended: Larkin is listed as out "for the foreseeable future" until a trade happens, and all of it is on him.
We already have the template for how a star is supposed to handle wanting out, and it belongs to Matt Duchene. Duchene spent more than a year in the same kind of limbo in Colorado, a beloved player who'd asked his favorite team to move him, and he never once quit being a pro. He played 14 games and put up 10 points in that final stretch. On the day the trade finally came, Duchene dressed for Colorado against the Islanders and played 1:59 before being pulled from the game. A teammate's description of him sets the exact bar Larkin is failing to clear: "he asked for a trade, but no matter what the tough circumstances were, he went to camp, played well and never said a bad word about the Avalanche." Duchene wanted out just as badly. He never refused to show up.
Larkin's own strategy made this worse. He has a no-trade clause and, when the request went public in June, he reportedly narrowed his market to three teams: Florida, Minnesota and Vegas. That list has since widened to around ten. You hand the front office a tiny buyer pool and attach an $8.7 million cap hit to it. Then you demand a return that doesn't gut the roster and act shocked that a deal is "difficult." Horcoff didn't invent that difficulty. Larkin built it, then punished the team for it by walking.
Detroit is not blameless, and this is the one piece of Larkin's case that's real. He was openly frustrated with a front office that sat on its hands, and he said so after last season, when the Red Wings missed the playoffs by five points. That grievance was fair. Years of deadline passivity will wear a franchise player down. But frustration with management doesn't license a captain to aim his no-trade clause at the roster like a weapon. He shrank the list of acceptable destinations, lost the captaincy, got booed at his own home opener, briefly patched things up, then blew it all up again by refusing to dress. One of those is a legitimate complaint. The rest is a tantrum with a signature on an eight-year, $69.6 million contract.
So spare me the gold star. Horcoff's kind words are a negotiating posture, and the only reason Larkin "played hard for us" is that it kept his trade value warm, right up until the day keeping it warm stopped being worth the discomfort. He got a suspension for that, unpaid, and he earned every dollar of it.
