Larkin Is Skating. The Defense Isn't Waiting for Him.

Good news arrived at Joe Louis Arena on September 23: Dylan Larkin was on the ice for the first time this fall, moving through practice and showing enough progress that Todd McLellan acknowledged the strides. After a week of nothing — no skating, no timeline, no clarity — that matters. It is the first concrete evidence that this roster might eventually be evaluated in something close to its intended form.

Here is the problem. The defense has no interest in waiting.

I wrote two days ago that 4.0 goals allowed per game was the number that should be keeping Detroit fans up at night. That figure hasn't budged, and the context around it keeps getting worse. Detroit was surrendering 3.0 goals per game across the prior 20-game stretch before this stretch began — a number that was already mediocre. The current rate represents a full extra goal conceded every single night. Meanwhile, the offense has genuinely improved, climbing from 2.4 to 3.2 goals per game over the same window. The Red Wings are scoring more and losing the margin anyway. That is not a team trending toward stability; that is a team bleeding out while applying a bandage to the wrong wound.

The structural reasons aren't hard to find. Moritz Seider, who logged over 25 minutes a night last season and finished at plus-13, remains the only defenseman on this roster who has demonstrated he can anchor a top pairing at a high level. Simon Edvinsson showed real promise — plus-7 in 43 games — but the depth behind those two is thin in a way that becomes catastrophic when the team is also missing its best center. Axel Sandin-Pellikka played 51 games last season and finished at minus-18. That is the third defensive option. The blue line was always going to need Larkin's presence in the faceoff dot and his ability to shorten the ice; without him, the defensive zone becomes a revolving door.

What makes Larkin's return genuinely important — beyond the obvious — is that his absence has distorted the team's ability to evaluate anything. The center depth chart behind him drops sharply to Emmitt Finnie, who produced at a fraction of what a true second-line center should, and then to options who have contributed almost nothing in meaningful ice time this season. That gap doesn't just hurt offensively. It affects defensive zone coverage, line matchups, and the team's ability to protect leads — which, at 4.0 goals against per game, it cannot do regardless. Larkin's return won't fix the blue line, but it at least removes one compounding variable from an equation that currently has too many.

My read is that the next two weeks will tell Detroit more about its ceiling than the first two games did. The Pittsburgh blowout was encouraging; a 7-4 win demonstrates that Raymond, DeBrincat, and the offensive core can execute at a high level even in chaos. But a 7-4 win also means you allowed four goals, which is exactly the rate this team has been surrendering. Detroit can score its way through some opponents. It cannot score its way through a full season while the defense concedes at this pace. Larkin skating is progress. Progress is not the same as solved.