"It's Hard to Feel Safe Out There. It's Hard to Know How to Protect Yourself": Dylan Larkin Questions NHL's Commitment to Player Safety after Scary Injury
Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin reflects on his injury scare, questioning the NHL's efficacy at upholding player safety
Early Tuesday afternoon at Little Caesars Arena's interview room, Detroit Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin spoke to the press for the first time since a frightening injury he'd suffered 10 games prior against of the Ottawa Senators.
Between his team's struggles, a busy schedule, and his own process of recovery, Larkin sounded tired as he fielded questions for not quite 15 minutes. Beyond his discussion of the incident itself, what stood out most from his comments was a not so subtle shot fired across the bow of the NHL's Department of Player Safety.
Asked to describe his reaction to the play, the Red Wing captain said, "I felt pretty embarrassed about it. It's just not something you want to be a part of...I was not happy with how it went and how the after-effects went. It's not really a hockey play. It's unfortunate that's what my last week has been." His sense of embarrassment is at once jarring and comprehensible.
On the one hand, embarrassment implies a degree of fault or responsibility that certainly wouldn't be fair to pin on Larkin based on an incident in which he was an obvious victim. Yet, in the context of the hyper-competitive world of professional sports and the machismo unique to hockey in particular, one can see why Larkin feels some measure of shame at having found himself knocked unconscious.
Of course, it would be painful for him to look back at video of the play, which he does not remember because of his injuries. That feeling can only grow more acute with the knowledge that his parents were in the arena watching him lay unconscious, while his wife was watching on television at home.
"I was always taught to not lay on the ice, and there's not much you can do about that situation, but it's hard to watch," he said, when pressed to explain his embarrassment. "It's hard to text people about...I've just been pretty down, and I'm sure that's normal, but that's just one of many emotions I've had over the last week."
While we can perhaps grasp why embarrassment was ready to hand in this context, Larkin shouldn't have to feel any kind of discomfiture at having been knocked unconscious by a dirty play, but, in a league where leadership is somewhere between ineffectual and inconsistent in matters large and small, on or off the ice, that's where he was left.
Some of that emotion has to be traced back to a sport's prevailing culture of toxicity, but it is only accentuated by the NHL's leadership void. Larkin didn't care to comment on the specific punishments passed on following the incident—both the in-game penalties and supplemental discipline or lack thereof.
However, he couldn't contain his frustration at the NHL's inaction, directing his criticisms not at the on-ice officials but rather the league office from which those officials take their orders.
"It's hard to feel safe out there," Larkin said. "It's hard to know how to protect yourself. I truly believe that we have the best refs in the world in the sport of hockey...Our refs are good. I just think the message being sent down from the top—what is safe and what's not, how to discipline it—there's a lot of questions there, and it's kind of scary as a player."
He cited the knee-on-knee hit that sent Kyle Connor to the injured reserve (which did not yield supplemental discipline) and Erik Gudbranson's need to take vigilante justice after absorbing a hit from behind (which led to a suspension for Gudbranson but not the initial offender) as recent examples of the NHL's inability to uphold a baseline in player safety across the league.
“I think if you look, the last week in the league has been pretty eye-opening," Larkin added. "It’s been kind of a trend I guess—this last week has been a highlight for player safety. As a player, I’m obviously closely attached because I just went through something, but I’ve talked to guys on our team, guys from other teams, and it’s hard to feel safe out there. It’s hard to know how to protect yourself.”
Larkin's sentiment is hardly a unique one among hockey circles. A lack of clarity and consistency is a long-standing criticism of the NHL's department of player safety, but perhaps the veteran captain of an Original Six franchise lending his voice to the critique can help spur action from a league for whom even microscopic change often seems anathema.
Some more traditional fans may feel that Detroit needs to do more to take matters of retributive justice into its own hands, but as an incident like Gudbranson's (or even the suspension to David Perron that emerged from Larkin's injury) shows, that approaches has its limitations too, with retaliation seemingly more likely to draw Player Safety's ire than an initial affront.
The simple fact is that the league cannot ignore its duty of care to protecting its players, which must begin with a clearer standard for acceptable on-ice conduct in an inherently dangerous game and judicious enforcement of that standard.
As far as the immediate path forward, Larkin explained that he has confidence the current Red Wings group can bounce back from a busy month defined by injuries and dropped points in ways previous Detroit teams could not.
"I think just getting through it," Larkin said, when asked for his sources of optimism and resilience at a trying moment in the season. "You're gonna have hard stretches in every season. I've been on teams where things like this have happened. We've had injury problems, and we really haven't had a chance, and I don't feel that way with this team. We're going into Winnipeg tomorrow night with some guys out of the lineup, and I still feel like we have a chance to win. Last night, we feel disappointed we had that effort [against Anaheim]. It's a completely different feeling than the past. We're in a rut, but there's ways out of it, and it's the guys in the room."
Also from THN Detroit