Horcoff's In-Box: One Injured Captain, One Unsigned Defenseman, One Ticking Clock

Camp is a few days old and Shawn Horcoff has yet to have a quiet morning. Dylan Larkin, the team's captain and its leading scorer last season with 26 goals, remains off the ice with an upper-body injury sustained during off-ice training. The extension deadline on Larkin's deal doesn't pause for rehabilitation timelines, which means Horcoff is being asked to make a significant long-term commitment on a player he hasn't watched skate a single shift since taking the interim GM title.

The Edvinsson situation sits right alongside it. The young defenseman is expected to be at camp, but he remains an unsigned restricted free agent, and the market moved on him when Zeev Buium signed his extension and reset what comparable blueliners can command. Horcoff has to negotiate that deal without the leverage a full offseason of normal operations would have provided, and without a permanent GM in place to share the weight of the decision.

There are things working in Detroit's favor, small as they feel right now. Alex DeBrincat has said publicly he wants to stay, and that kind of voluntary commitment from a 23-goal scorer matters when everything else is unsettled. Moritz Seider is healthy and in camp. The core, when assembled, is real — it just hasn't been assembled in quite a while.

Horcoff's job for the next week or so is narrow and specific: keep Edvinsson in the building and under contract, get a medical timeline on Larkin that lets him make a sensible decision on the extension, and hold the roster together long enough for a permanent GM to take over. That's not a vision. It's triage. But triage is what the situation requires.