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.
"Neither team did anything. They both ended up making the playoffs and are playing very well at this time, led by their best players," Yzerman stated Tuesday.
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.
Players who stick around for a while; they do that for a reason, and having a great leader is a part of the equation. Those aforementioned players and future Wings looked up to Yzerman and when he had an off night, they'd do their best to pick up the slack.
That's what a championship caliber team does, and that's what the current team lacks. All things considered, Yzerman agreed that it's not all on Larkin; he needs more help from the core players, but when everything is taken into account, he's still the captain.
"I’m counting on more leadership," Yzerman said. "Dylan Larkin can use more leadership, much like myself as a player. Look at all those guys I played with. Just because you wear the C or you don’t wear the C doesn’t mean you’re not a leader on the team."
Let's take a more modern approach. Let's take the three highest-paid players from the Red Wings and compare their regular season performances to the Presidents' Trophy winning Winnipeg Jets, for instance, and see the difference.
For the Jets, we have Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor, and Neal Pionk. They combined for 90 goals and 133 assists for 223 points. For the Red Wings, there's Larkin, Moritz Seider, and Lucas Raymond. They combined for 65 goals and 131 assists for 196 points.
It doesn't look like a lot, but 25 goals is a good chunk in the NHL
Ask yourselves this. If Detroit's highest-paid players would have stepped it up just a smidgen, would they have snapped their much-publicized postseason gig? Most likely. Yes, they would have gotten knocked out of the playoffs early, but at least they would have ended that dreadful streak.
Detroit has a very solid foundation. They just need to build upon that, acquire a pair of solid defensemen in the offseason, improve the penalty kill, and boost morale within the organization. And that starts at the top. If your leader is pointing the finger at other people before evaluating his own performance, you may need a new captain.
"I’m counting on our best players, our leaders, to give us a bit of a morale boost," Yzerman said. "That’s what they’re paid for and that’s the expectation for them."