Has Dylan Larkin checked out on the Detroit Red Wings?

Imagine going to your boss and giving him or her your two weeks’ notice. Your boss tells you they are under no obligation to honor your request and expect you to keep showing up for work until they decide your future. You keep showing up, clicking your mouse, making awkward jokes at the water cooler and waiting for 5 p.m. so you can clock out. Is it fair to say you’d check out?

This isn’t a perfect analogy for Dylan Larkin. It would be like working as a manager at a local credit union and saying you wanted to leave, but that your boss needed to orchestrate getting you a similar management role at a large financial institution, and not just any financial institution, but maybe one of, say, three financial institutions. That’s more like it. You’d still probably check out emotionally from your co-workers at your little credit union.

And who are we kidding? The Detroit Red Wings definitely more closely resemble the little credit union than the financial behemoths of Florida, Vegas and Minnesota.

Where does this snarkiness come from? How about “accidentally” passing the puck to none other than Oliver BONK in the final 10 seconds, setting up a shorthanded chance worth 0.22 expected goals? That was the best chance the Red Wings gave up all third period, and better than 96% of the unblocked shots taken in the NHL this season. Head coach Todd McLellan said they handled “the end of the game exactly how I wanted, except for that mistake.”

If it were Anton Johansson who made that play, or even Axel Sandin-Pellikka, we’d probably shrug it off as a boneheaded play by a young defenseman. But it was former captain Dylan Larkin. In his 12th season. At the age of 30. With a man advantage.

The 2025-26 version of Dylan Larkin doesn’t do that. At least not when the calendar still says January.

It’s exactly the kind of play that confirms what the fans who booed him at the home opener already believe: Dylan Larkin has checked out.

What the numbers have to say

To pin down what “checking out” looks like, I put together some criteria. It’s easy to say he doesn’t pass the eye test, but my eyes can be biased.

What he did with 8 seconds to go in the third period is a good place to start - giveaways. Even though the scoresheet didn’t record that as a giveaway, carelessness is a symptom of checking out. Takeaways (or the lack of them) are another indicator.

In all, I looked at seven metrics, each over his last five games and ranked against every other five-game stretch of his career:

1. Game score (yes, I’m including his good game against Ottawa, because that still happened)
2. 5v5 expected-goal share
3. Points per 60
4. Individual expected goals per 60
5. Shot attempts per 60
6. Takeaways per 60
7. Giveaways per 60

One caveat before the results: five games is a tiny sample, and nothing here is statistically significant. The fairest thing I can do is compare these five games with every other five-game stretch of Larkin’s career. There are 760 of them. His best single game is four points, and he’s done that three times. A six-point night would jump off the page, and so would a five-game stretch that tops all 760 in any of these metrics.

The noise

Not all of the areas I looked at turned out as I expected. I went into this thinking that speed bursts might tell me how much he cares, but those numbers don’t say much. Larkin is averaging 9.0 bursts of 20-plus mph per 60 minutes, which would be the second-highest rate of his six seasons of NHL Edge tracking. And Thursday’s game against Philadelphia was his longest skate of the season: 3.68 miles.

But just because you continue to be fast doesn’t mean you’re moving with purpose or thinking the game quickly.

Larkin’s game score and 5v5 expected-goal share are slightly above his career median for a five-game stretch. Over these five games he’s averaging a 0.80 game score by MoneyPuck’s formula, against a career median of 0.78. His 5v5 expected-goal share is further above his norm: 51.5%, against 48.8%. Detroit is getting more of the chances with him on the ice than it usually does.

Expected-goal share leans heavily on his linemates. Points per 60 and individual expected goals per 60 (ixG) are more his own, and there he’s in the 32nd and 39th percentiles of his five-game stretches. Neither is good, but about a third of his career has looked like this or worse.

Evidence of checking out

A fun fact about the off-ice scorers at Little Caesars Arena: they don’t like to credit anyone with giveaways. Detroit’s rink ranks 27th of 32 in giveaways recorded per game this season, and it ranked 31st last season.

Remember how Larkin’s play almost gifted the Flyers a goal with less than 10 seconds left? Now it makes a bit more sense how such an egregious mental error stayed off the stat sheet. It also makes his total harder to wave away: that same stingy crew has still charged him with 13 giveaways in four home games.

His 14 giveaways over these five games are the most of any five-game stretch of his career, and that’s saying something. The fact that all but one of his five games have been home games shows that his giveaways have been underrepresented.

He had stretches earlier in his career being careless with the puck. He’s also come back from injury many times before. But at no point in his career did he pile up this many giveaways over five straight games.

Over these five games, his giveaways per 60 are 2.6 times the league rate for forwards. For his career, he typically runs about 1.4 times the league rate, so he’s always given the puck away more than most. This is nearly double even his own norm.

Pair that with his takeaways falling off a cliff, and it looks like someone who isn’t thinking the game at the pace he needs to. Larkin typically has 1.72 takeaways per 60. Over these five games he’s at 0.56, a two-thirds drop and the 13th percentile of his five-game stretches.

And the final nail in the coffin: he’s averaging 11.3 shot attempts per 60, about five fewer than his career median of 16.8 and the 8th percentile of his five-game stretches. Only five times in his career has he been this careless with the puck while shooting this little: January 2017, March 2017, late 2017, January 2019 and the 2019 holidays. All five came in the pits of Detroit’s rebuild. None since January 2020.

Is it possible it’s just rust?

For context, Larkin got hurt working out right before training camp. The timing was terrible both logistically and optically. It came days after the Red Wings took away his captaincy, and he addressed it at the same camp-opening presser where he tried to clear the air on his trade request without saying much of anything. He missed all four preseason games and the first two regular-season games.

Getting up to speed after missing all of camp and six games is tough at any point in the season, and tougher at the very start. McLellan said as much on Thursday: “Larks is trying to catch up.” But he’s been on the injured list plenty of times in his career, and his returns have never looked like this.

In five of the six times he’s returned from missing three or more games, his giveaway rate went down over his first five games back. On average, it fell about 40% below that season’s rate. He’s typically more cautious as he gets back into game shape. His shot volume has never been this low coming back from an injury or to start a season, either. In 11 previous openers and six returns, his lowest was 13.1 attempts per 60.

Some of this is probably rust. It isn’t all rust.

When the decline began

There’s evidence that Larkin’s decline started before the offseason. This is a hot take with an asterisk. His right leg buckled as he went to shoot against Florida on March 6, he missed seven games, and he may not have been fully healthy when he came back. But the slide started in late December, more than two months before he got hurt.

The 2025-26 season as a whole was his weakest value season since the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season. Last season his goals above replacement (Evolving-Hockey’s GAR) ranked in the 63rd percentile of NHL forwards: above average, but well below the 82nd-to-89th-percentile range he’d been in for the four seasons before.

The whole team fell off after January 25, when the Red Wings were 32-16-5 and tied for first in the East. They went 9-15-5 the rest of the way. Larkin fell off even further. From then on, Detroit had 46.9% of the 5v5 expected goals with him off the ice and 42.8% with him on it. His takeaways for the season hit a career low (0.72 per 60, 26th percentile among forwards), but his giveaways stayed right around the league rate.

When the late-season collapse started happening again, Larkin didn’t lead the team out of it. He caved. The fact that his play suffered during the collapse is not noteworthy. It’s that his play suffered more than the rest of the team’s.

Seven weeks after the season ended, he requested a trade.

And after that, he stopped shooting the puck, stopped taking the puck away from the other team, and instead started giving it to them.

If I were Dylan Larkin’s co-worker, I’d assume he’d already put in his two weeks’ notice. This guy has checked out.