Edvinsson's Agent Is Talking. Nobody's There to Listen.

Simon Edvinsson is still a restricted free agent, and his agent has now broken silence on it — which is the polite way of saying the situation has gotten uncomfortable enough that someone felt the need to say something publicly. The problem is that the person who would normally handle this call doesn't exist yet. Detroit is working through a search firm to find its next general manager, and until that hire lands, Edvinsson's contract sits in a queue with no one at the front of it.

This matters more than a routine RFA holdout would. Edvinsson logged over 22 minutes a night last season in 43 games, and with Moritz Seider carrying the top pairing, Detroit needs its second young defenseman settled and in camp — not floating in limbo while the organization sorts out its own leadership structure. The blue line was already a problem last season; the final month of the year made that plain enough. Leaving one of its better pieces unsigned heading into the fall compounds a situation that doesn't need more complications.

The incoming GM will inherit a full inbox — Larkin's extension, three injured forwards, a thin goaltending depth chart — and Edvinsson's deal will be somewhere near the top of it. My read is that this one gets done relatively quickly once someone is actually in the chair, because the organizational incentive to resolve it is obvious. But "quickly once someone is in the chair" and "quickly" are not the same thing right now, and the search firm is still working. The agent breaking silence is a clock starting, not a crisis — but clocks have a way of becoming crises in Detroit this summer.