has requested a trade away from the team<\/a>, opening the door for the longest-tenured player in the organization to move on.<\/p>\nLarkin has been with the Red Wings for all 11 years of his NHL career and has yet to find any major team success.<\/p>\n
He has made the playoffs just once, and that was during his rookie season. He has been there through the entirety of the team’s current 10-year playoff drought and has seemingly become increasingly frustrated with the losing.<\/p>\n
He was critical of the team’s inaction at the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline, and after yet another late-season meltdown in 2025-26, he is now looking to get a fresh start elsewhere. <\/p>\n
Assuming the Red Wings follow through with his request, he will be a wildly sought-after player. Even though he will be 30 next season, he has scored at least 30 goals in each of the past five seasons and is a legitimate top-line center who can also impact the game defensively. He is still signed long-term through the 2031 season at what should be a very team-friendly salary cap number of $8.7 million per season. Given the lack of center depth on the free agent market, as well as the number of teams in need of a first-or second-line center, there should be a robust market for him.<\/p>\n
He has no-trade protections that can dictate where he goes, but if he is requesting a trade, he is probably open to a wide range of destinations. <\/p>\n
So let’s take a look at some teams that could be potential landing spots for him. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We might have our first major blockbuster of the NHL offseason brewing. Word surfaced on Thursday from Sportsnet’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-717222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}