He was born in Waterford, played two seasons in Plymouth for the U.S. National Development Program, spent one year as a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and has been an important player for the Detroit Red Wings since 2015.
The only Michigan-born captain in Red Wings history, Larkin is a speedy centre who plays in all situations and has scored at least 30 goals in each of the past five seasons.
His story was the perfect match for a franchise steeped in hockey history, and he appeared to be destined to lead the Red Wings back to glory.
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported Thursday that Larkin, who turns 30 this July, has asked for a trade, and he will surely get it as teams line up to make a pitch for the best centre available this summer.
What went wrong? Let’s look at how this match made in heaven turned to hell.
Larkin’s rookie season in 2015-16 was Pavel Datsyuk’s final year in the NHL, and Henrik Zetterberg was forced to end his career due to injury two years after that. The Red Wings have never been able to find another elite centre to pair with Larkin.
They’ve certainly tried, whether through the draft (Michael Rasmussen, Joe Veleno, Marco Kasper) or free agency (Frans Nielsen, Andrew Copp, J.T. Compher, Vladislav Namestnikov). But any player brought in to serve as the second-line centre hasn’t succeeded in the role for long.
In fact, since Larkin entered the league, Zetterberg is still second on the team’s scoring list for centres despite last playing in 2018. Here are Detroit’s top 10 scoring centres since the 2015-16 season:
Larkin is a great player who makes his team better, but he’s never scored more than 79 points in a season. With so many teams deploying superstars who can hit 100 points, the Red Wings have struggled to keep up. Sergei Fedorov is still the last Red Wings player to reach 100 points in a season, in 1995-96.
The lack of help for Larkin extends to other parts of the roster, too. Drafting early in Larkin’s career was especially poor under former general manager Ken Holland. From 2015-18, the Red Wings made five first-round picks who all underwhelmed: Evgeny Svechnikov (19th, 2015), Dennis Cholowski (20th, 2016), Rasmussen (ninth, 2017), Filip Zadina (sixth, 2018) and Veleno (30th, 2018). Filip Hronek (second-round, 2016) is the only player drafted by the Red Wings over that time who has had an impactful NHL career.
Steve Yzerman succeeded Holland as general manager in 2019 — after the Red Wings had already missed the playoffs three times — and immediately initiated a deep rebuild. That was seven years ago, and only three of Yzerman’s draft picks — Moritz Seider (sixth, 2019), Lucas Raymond (fourth, 2020) and Simon Edvinsson (sixth, 2021) — have developed into core pieces to date. None of those three is a centre.
Yzerman has been aggressive in trades and free agency to offset all the misses in the draft, with mixed results. Alex DeBrincat, John Gibson, Patrick Kane, Andrew Copp and Justin Faulk have all been positive additions in recent years, but other moves, such as signing Ben Chiarot, Justin Holl and J.T. Compher to multi-year deals, have held the team back.
Every team has moves that worked out and others that didn’t, but the reality is the Red Wings’ roster remains a significant work in progress compared to teams that annually make deep playoff runs.
It appears Larkin has grown tired of waiting for help to come.
Two captains, no consensus
There have been numerous signs over the years that Larkin and Yzerman have a frosty relationship, which is a shame since Yzerman was once a young Red Wings captain who helped snap a long championship drought. Instead of a mentor-mentee partnership, the two have frequently held opposing views on the team’s direction.
The first fracture came in the 2022-23 season. Larkin, in his third year as captain and only 26, played most of the season without a contract extension and appeared headed for unrestricted free agency.
Then, on March 1, 2023, Larkin and the Red Wings agreed to an eight-year extension with an annual cap hit of $8.7 million.
The very next day, March 2, Yzerman traded Tyler Bertuzzi, Larkin’s best friend and longtime linemate, to the Boston Bruins in a surprising pivot to being a seller before the trade deadline. Larkin met the media that same day, sitting alone at a podium in what was supposed to be a press conference about his extension, and was close to tears as he talked about Bertuzzi’s departure.
“It hurts,” he said that day. “The last 24 hours have been one of the hardest days of the business side of it. Being excited, being happy, talking to Tyler yesterday and being happy for me, and then I saw him this morning and he was upset and I am too. So it’s difficult.”
Two years later, in April of 2025, Larkin showed more frustration with Yzerman, this time over his lack of action at the trade deadline. That season, the Red Wings were one point out of a wild-card spot at the March 7 deadline, but Yzerman only made one minor trade with the Blackhawks, and they went 9-9-2 over the final 20 games to miss by four points.
Speaking to the media after that season ended, Larkin said he wished Yzerman had been a buyer.
“We didn’t gain any momentum from the trade deadline, and guys were kinda down about it,” Larkin said. “It’d be nice to add something and bring a little bit of a spark on the ice and maybe a morale boost as well.”
Yzerman responded in his own media availability a couple of days later, saying: “I’m counting on our best players, our leaders, to give us a bit of a morale boost. That’s what they’re paid for and that’s the expectations for them.”
That summer, Yzerman traded for John Gibson and signed veterans Mason Appleton and James van Riemsdyk, despite being rumoured to be interested in free agents Mitch Marner and Nikolaj Ehlers. Speaking after the free agency rush, in July of 2025, Yzerman admitted: “It seems like the guys had really targeted where they want to go, and out of respect to the teams, we knew pretty early that we weren’t going to be involved in much.”
Despite the lack of splashy moves, the Red Wings were successful for most of this past season, even sitting in first in the Eastern Conference in late January. While they started to show signs of cracks before the Olympic break, Yzerman was a buyer at the deadline this time around, giving up an unprotected first-round pick and a top prospect to the St. Louis Blues for defenceman Justin Faulk. Hours after that trade was completed, Larkin was injured in a game against the Florida Panthers. He missed seven games, during which the Red Wings went 3-3-1 and fell out of a playoff spot.
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At the end of the season, Larkin was asked directly if he was worried he might never return to the playoffs, and he sounded like a player who wanted to still be part of the solution in Detroit. We now know that isn’t the case.
“I’d say the last four or five years, (Seider) and (Raymond) have arrived and become star players in my opinion, and we’ve been pushing towards the playoffs and it hasn’t happened,” Larkin said in April. “I’m just thinking now going back to when I re-signed, I signed an eight-year deal and I knew that we had work to do and I knew that we weren’t going to win the Stanley Cup the next day, but I wanted to be here and I want to be here to help this team in any way I can to win the Stanley Cup.”
Detroit’s playoff drought stands at 10 years, but in each of the past four seasons, they’ve been competitive deep into the schedule. Then things quickly unravelled in March.
Larkin’s play in March has been a mixed bag. In 2022-23, he was red hot with six goals and 16 points in 15 games. But since then, his health has been a problem at the most important time of the year. In 2023-24, Larkin missed eight games in March with an upper-body injury that required off-season surgery. In 2024-25, he played in every game but was ineffective due to an injury from the 4 Nations Face-Off, scoring only four goals and nine points in 14 games. Then this past season, he missed two weeks in March with a lower-body injury.
“When it got tight, we also got tight,” Larkin said in April when reflecting on the most recent March collapse. “We just got tight as a group and allowed teams to get back in it.”
This season, Detroit finished with 92 points, seven behind the Ottawa Senators for the final wild-card spot, but also the most by a Red Wings team during the playoff drought. As each year passes, the March collapses have gone from simply disappointing to much more concerning for players, management and fans.
While the Red Wings stumbled, Larkin experienced playoff-type hockey twice with Team USA, at the 4 Nations Face-Off and the Winter Olympics. He was on the ice when Jack Hughes scored the golden goal this February, and later called the experience “something I’ll remember forever.”
Larkin didn’t have to be the No. 1 centre on a team that featured Auston Matthews, Jack Eichel, Jack Hughes and Brock Nelson. But he was still effective, with coach Mike Sullivan deploying him up and down the lineup in a variety of roles.
Those tournaments reminded Larkin what playoff hockey is like, and he thrived in that spotlight.
“Just winning and being able to celebrate that, and getting a taste of that… it’s motivated me to hopefully win more in my career,” Larkin said after returning from the Olympics with a gold medal.
Team USA featured multiple players who asked for trades and found success in new places, including Eichel, Matthew Tkachuk and Quinn Hughes. Larkin has the chance to follow the same path, possibly even with one of them as his teammate again.
Could a bigger reset come next?
Larkin’s trade request has put Yzerman at a crossroads. The Red Wings have no obvious replacement for their No. 1 centre, but the GM could try to acquire one, such as Robert Thomas or Nico Hischier, and keep pushing forward on the same trajectory. Or Yzerman could begin a larger reset of the roster.
The Buffalo Sabres, who snapped a 14-year playoff drought this spring, could be a blueprint for where the Red Wings go next. The Sabres’ first attempt at a rebuild included drafting Sam Reinhart and Jack Eichel, and acquiring Ryan O’Reilly. But eventually the Sabres moved on from all three players and the pieces they received in those trades — including Alex Tuch and Tage Thompson — formed a new core with draft picks Rasmus Dahlin and Zach Benson that eventually got them back to the playoffs.
The Red Wings should get a significant return in a Larkin trade, but if Yzerman wants to shake up his team even more than that, he has another player to offer teams: Alex DeBrincat.
The 28-year-old Michigan native requested a trade to Detroit from Ottawa in 2023 and has been one of the Red Wings’ most important scorers for three years now. This past season, he had 41 goals and 85 points to lead the team, with both totals the most by any Red Wings player during the current playoff drought.
DeBrincat will be an unrestricted free agent in 2027 and has a 16-team no-trade list.
The Red Wings also have a decision to make in net. Gibson, who rebounded nicely in his first season in Detroit after losing his net in Anaheim, is one year away from unrestricted free agency. The Red Wings have three goaltending prospects — Sebastian Cossa, Trey Augustine and Michal Postava — who will be pushing for NHL starts as soon as next season. Trading from that logjam could be another way for Yzerman to reset his team this summer.
Regardless of what happens, it’s clear the team now belongs to Seider, Raymond and Edvinsson. All three are 25 or younger and have already established themselves as premier NHL players. It now falls on Yzerman to surround those three with more talented players than he ever did with Larkin.
His future in the GM chair depends on it.