Dylan Larkin won't play for the Detroit Red Wings tonight against Chicago, and Todd McLellan isn't the one explaining why.
The news landed this morning. McLellan said general manager Shawn Horcoff will address the situation, which is about the most loaded sentence a head coach can hand reporters on a game day.
So what's going on? When a coach points toward the GM's office instead of the trainer's room, everybody in the building starts reading between the lines.
No injury designation sits next to his name, even with Albert Johansson and Daniil Tarasov both carrying day-to-day tags.
And this is the highest-paid player on the roster. Larkin's $8,700,000 cap hit sits above both Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond, so this is no depth piece quietly missing a night.
He's also dressed for only 10 of Detroit's 12 games this season. The production in those 10 has been modest: two goals, four assists and a +3 rating.
Shawn Horcoff gets his first real test as Red Wings GM
Horcoff took the job on September 15. Now the first real fire on his desk involves the most expensive contract on his books.
Think of a restaurant where the head chef doesn't show up and the owner promises to explain later. The diners still arrive for the 7:30 seating.
The Blackhawks walk in at 4-8-0, and they're 0-4-0 away from home. On paper, it's the softest possible night to absorb something like this.
It's also the first meeting of the season between the two clubs. There's no head-to-head tape from this year for the Red Wings to lean on.
The good news is that the scoring hasn't been running through Larkin. Alex DeBrincat leads the team with 13 points, and Raymond has seven points over his last five games.
Viktor Arvidsson already has four power-play goals. Emmitt Finnie has scored five times on a $921,667 cap hit, one of the best bargains on the roster.
The bad news is depth. Marco Kasper and Mason Appleton are both on injured reserve until at least November 12, and the forward group was already thin before today.
Andrew Copp is sitting at a -5 rating. Keegan Kolesar has been held without a point through 12 games, and somebody in that bottom six is about to get extra minutes.
The Red Wings sit at 5-4-3, eighth in the division with a -4 goal differential. The margin for error is basically none.
Here's the problem with how this was handled. Sending McLellan out with a non-answer on game day turns one missed game into a week of speculation.
A two-line medical update would have killed the story by lunch, if that's what this is. Anything else, and Horcoff just made it a lot louder.
St. Louis comes to town Saturday. After that, the Red Wings head south for a back-to-back in Florida and Tampa Bay, and nobody knows yet who's getting on that plane.
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More details to come.
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Should Shawn Horcoff have explained Dylan Larkin's absence before puck drop tonight?
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