My favorite goal that I've ever seen live: Jan. 4, 2019, the woeful Detroit Red Wings hosting a really good Nashville Predators squad. The Wings went into it having lost 10 of their last 11, and they started the game by surrendering the first two goals. But from 0-2 down, they put together an unexpected comeback, first with a speedster highlight from Andreas Athanasiou, then scores from Thomas Vanek and Tyler Bertuzzi. The Preds tied the game up late in the third, forcing overtime, and just when it looked like we were headed for a shootout, the team's beloved leader—though not yet captain—settled things himself. Dylan Larkin deked out one Nashvillain at the top of the offensive zone, curved away from another, and then flipped a backhander past a couple more bodies and into the net. I think of this goal often to remind myself that, no matter how a season's gone in the weeks or months before, it's always worth going to a rink and screaming for the home team. Every game has the potential to make you very, very glad you went.
Now an 11-year vet, the 29-year-old Larkin has only become more enmeshed in the hearts of Red Wings fans, even as the franchise itself has stayed stuck in neutral. In 2015–16, he led the Wings in scoring as a rookie before they stalled out in a five-game first-round series against the Lightning. Since then, every other player on the roster has moved on, and the Red Wings haven't made a single playoff appearance.
Will this regular season, finally, end differently than the nine barren years before it? It's starting to feel like maybe it will. The Red Wings, statistically, are just about average in every category you can find. Per game, they're 18th in goals scored, 14th-best in goals allowed, 14th in shots taken, 15th-best in shots allowed, 16th in team save percentage, and 19th in shooting percentage. Their goal differential is a mere plus-five. And yet. Not only do these middling numbers alone beat basically every season of the playoff drought, they also come from a team that's managing to win a lot more tightly contested games than they lose. On some nights they still get soundly outclassed, but more often the Wings are looking like a real threat at the top of the conference. So far this season, in a strange year where everyone's bunched up tight in the East and the Buffalo Sabres are outperforming the Florida Panthers, only the Lightning and Hurricanes have put together a better record than Detroit.
I am being extremely cautious about this. Neither of the Detroit goalies, John Gibson or Cam Talbot, have really earned my trust, though Gibson's been very solid lately. If Moritz Seider happens to go down with an injury, the defense is utterly screwed, because he plays maybe the most demanding minutes of anyone in the sport. The bottom half of this lineup, which consists of early-development kids mixed with bland veterans, puts a lot of stress on the top three guys—Larkin, Lucas Raymond, Alex DeBrincat—to produce.
Throughout this campaign, I've fixated on the rough losses more than the smooth wins, because they fit with the "We can't do enough" story the team has told about itself over the past decade. But if there's one thing that gets me unambiguously thrilled to be a Red Wings fan, it's a Dylan Larkin overtime winner. He had one early in the year on a wide-open breakaway against Tampa, in the midst of a nice little win streak that washed out the bitter taste of a 5-1 opening-night debacle. He scored another against the Stars when I was lucky enough to be in the building, home for the holidays and for the hockey. Larkin's power-play goal tied the game with four minutes remaining, and at the start of OT he took advantage of a meek defense to get into the slot and fire a wrister past the goalie. On Wednesday, at the end of a grueling 1-1 struggle in Toronto, Larkin netted his 25th goal of the season, which puts him on pace for a new career high.
Seider got to star in the role of bulldozer on the play, charging into the netural zone to demolish a helpless Easton Cowan and take the puck for himself. Larkin sped past Cowan's downed body and into the attacking zone, where he and Seider had a brief window for a 2-on-0. Seider put the puck on a platter for his captain, and Larkin settled and shot in the blink of an eye. Joseph Woll didn't have a chance.
Two points are two points, but overtime goals just mean more to me when they come from Dylan Larkin, because in every way he is the hero that Detroit has craved. He's the local kid drafted in the epilogue of the franchise's glory years. He's carried the weight of so many terrible seasons on his shoulders. He chose to re-sign in 2023 anyway. And this year, he's finally reaping the rewards while still serving as 1C and face of the franchise. Larkin's the man who lights the path ahead, and when he gets to bask in the goal lamp's glory at the end of the night, that means the game went down exactly the way that the fans hoped to see. His list of OT winners dates back to 2018, but for the first time in his career, those wins might hold value for the Wings beyond just the sentimental.
