- NHL Network’s Mike Johnson spent a full segment pitching a Dylan Larkin trade to Montreal
- Larkin’s list is Minnesota, Vegas, Florida and Dallas, and the Canadiens aren’t on it
- Read below for Johnson’s full pitch and why Utah keeps coming up too
The team getting pitched hardest as a Dylan Larkin landing spot is one he never put on his list.
Mike Johnson was asked on NHL Network this week what the Red Wings should do with their captain, and he went straight to Montreal.
“You look at Montreal and how stacked they are for the next four or five years to be a legitimate Stanley Cup contender year after year after year,” Johnson said. “And oh yeah, they have a boatload of prospects that they could send back the other way that could help Detroit right away.”
Johnson floated Michael Hage, the Michigan forward Montreal took in the first round, as the piece Detroit would build the deal around. Larkin would slide in behind Nick Suzuki as the Canadiens’ No. 2 center.
Watch the full segment:
Then comes the part that has stalled this whole thing since June. Larkin holds a full no-trade clause and handed Detroit a short list of places he’d go.
That list is Minnesota, Vegas and Florida, with Dallas added in July by MLive’s Ansar Khan. Montreal has never been on it, and Johnson knows it.
He spent the back half of the segment arguing the objections don’t hold up.
“I get it’s cold, but guess what? It’s cold in Detroit,” Johnson said. “If you’re about winning, they’re on the precipice of being about winning for the next half decade.”
TSN’s Bryan Hayes got there first. Talking about Larkin on Overdrive last week, Hayes said the Suzuki pairing is the whole argument and the holdup is the player himself:
Utah keeps surfacing as the other off-list option. Ryan O’Hara of The Hockey News wrote this week that the Mammoth case got stronger once they added Anders Lee and Vincent Trocheck. Trocheck won Olympic gold alongside Larkin in Italy.
O’Hara landed on the same catch everyone else does:
Larkin is 30, he’s a Michigan kid who grew up on this team, and he wore the C through a decade of Detroit going nowhere. Uprooting his family for a rebuild-adjacent roster in Utah is a different ask than a short flight to Minnesota.
Detroit hasn’t made it easier on itself. The Red Wings still don’t have a permanent general manager, and a camp holdout was never on the table for their captain.
Camp opens in a few weeks with Larkin still in Detroit, four teams on his list, and every analyst on TV naming a fifth.
