Not a trade thread, not a contract thread, I want to talk purely about Dylan Larkin as the captain of this franchise and how this fanbase actually feels about him in that role.
He's the hometown kid who took the C in a hard era, played through a rebuild that asked him to be the face of a lot of losing, and never once publicly checked out or asked his way out when it would have been easy to. That counts for a lot to me. On the other hand, a captain eventually gets measured by where he leads the room, and a decade of Aprils on the golf course is part of his ledger whether that's fair to pin on one man or not.
So strip the noise. How do you genuinely feel about Larkin wearing the C right now. Right guy, right time, or a good soldier who's carried more than he should have to?
larkin is OURS and i'm tired of pretending the captain debate is anything other than people wanting a scapegoat for a front office's pace. this man grew up forty minutes from the rink, wore the C through the worst of it, and plays every shift like it owes him money. you do not find that loyalty in a free agent. i will hear criticism of the team. i will not hear it of his heart.
I don't think anyone serious questions his heart, Molly, and the people who do aren't worth answering. The honest question fenwick is asking is a leadership question, not a character question. A captain in a contending window needs to be the second or third best player on a real team. Larkin's been asked to be the best player on a flawed one for years, and that's a different and harder job that quietly ages a guy. My worry isn't whether he deserves the C. It's whether we've burned his best years carrying water.
honest take larkin is exactly the kind of captain you want when your winning and exactly the kind you start questioning when your not and thats not really about him its about us needing someone to blame. the guy plays hurt every year and never once threw a teammate under the bus in a presser. wheres the actual problem here
I've watched a lot of captains wear that C, kid. Yzerman, Lidstrom, the names that hang in the rafters. And the thing they all had in common wasn't a leadership style, it was that the team finally got good around them. Stevie was a frustrated 60 goal scorer carrying bad teams before he was a champion. We forget that. We act like the C made him. The team made the C mean something. Larkin's carrying the exact load young Yzerman did. Get him a real roster and ask me again about his captaincy.
@GordieHoweElbows said:Larkin's carrying the exact load young Yzerman did
THIS. people forget young yzerman put up monster numbers on teams that got swept and got called soft and a loser before bowman ever showed up. larkin is on the exact same arc. give him the supporting cast and watch what he becomes. LGRW
I land in a fairly boring place: he's the right captain, he's been asked to do too much, and both of those things are true at once. The one fair critique isn't about him, it's about the org leaning on his identity as the heartbeat as a substitute for actually building a winner around him. The loyalty narrative can become a crutch. He's held up his end honorably. The question is entirely whether the people above him hold up theirs while he's still in his prime.
right guy. wrong decade to be asked to carry it. simple as.
Reading all this back, the consensus is healthier than the discourse usually is. Almost nobody actually wants the C off him. What people want is for the franchise to stop using his loyalty as a reason to feel okay about slow progress. Gordie's Yzerman parallel is the load bearing point: captains get judged by the team they end up on, and Larkin's verdict isn't written yet because the roster hasn't given it a fair chance to be. Good thread, everyone.
ONE THING I'LL ADD AND THEN I'M DONE: the man wears the C for the team he grew up worshipping in the city he's from. you cannot manufacture that and you cannot buy it and most franchises NEVER get it. the day we take that for granted is the day we deserve the decade we've had. critique the front office all you want. the captain is exactly who you'd build in a lab if you could.