The tension in the room was luminous.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Steve Yzerman and Dylan Larkin didn’t see eye-to-eye regarding the captain’s comments at the end-of-season press conference.Larkin took aim at Red Wings management when he claimed that the team “didn’t do anything” at the trade deadline other than acquire a backup goaltender in Petr Mrazek and forward Craig Smith.
“We didn’t gain any momentum from the trade deadline and guys were kind of 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.”
Before Yzerman took questions from the media at his own season wrap-up, he cleverly pointed out two teams, the Montreal Canadiens and the St. Louis Blues, that managed to make the playoffs despite making limited moves at the deadline.Larkin is complaining that there’s a lack of morale in the Detroit locker room
Steve is basically saying, ‘You’re the captain. That’s your job. Brayden Schenn and Nick Suzuki put their teams on their back. Why can’t you do the same?”
And like the NFL’s late John Madden, some younger fans may forget that at one point, Yzerman was a hockey player himself, and an all-time great at that. He was the captain of this team for 20 seasons, won three Stanley Cups, but even more impressingly is the fact that they only missed the playoffs once under his tutelage.Detroit did fail to make the playoffs in the 1985-86 season and Yzerman was a member of that team, but Danny Gare was still the captain at that time. The one year they failed to make the big dance with Yzerman at the helm was the 1989-90 season, but if you look at the roster of that team, you’ll notice a lot of names: Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Dallas Drake, and Vladimir Konstantinov.
Lidstrom stuck around for his entire career, Fedorov for 13 seasons, Drake for a couple of seasons until he was shipped to the old Winnipeg Jets, and Konstantinov played for the Wings until his career was cut short
