Dylan Larkin doesn't remember the play, but he was embarrassed after the fact. The Red Wings captain saw replays of himself getting knocked out and lying face down on the ice, and he got a slew of concerned texts that he was too upset to answer.
All Larkin remembers is battling for space in front of the net with Mathieu Joseph of the Senators. Next thing Larkin knew, Red Wings head athletic trainer Piet Van Zant was in his ear "asking about my neck," he said Tuesday, speaking to the media for the first time since getting helped off the ice 10 days ago in Detroit's 5-1 loss to Ottawa.
Larkin's neck was fine, a relief given the serious neck injury he sustained three seasons ago. It was his head and his jaw, he said, that bore most of the blow as he took a shot to the back of the head from Jospeh and then fell forward into a stick and onto the ice.
"Watching it back, replaying it in your head, it's pretty scary and just a tough evening," Larkin said. "Pretty embarrassed by it. There's a lot of emotions there that you kind of replay and you live with. You have to see that highlight, you could call it, that will be attached to your name for a while. It will always be there, and people will always be able to watch it. It's pretty tough."
Larkin's parents were in the crowd at Little Caesars Arena that night, along with his agent and some friends. He struggled to talk about the incident on Tuesday, in part because his memory of it is foggy -- but also because of his frustration with how everything played out. He said that Joseph's aggressive attempt to clear him from the front of net "was not really a hockey play, and it's just unfortunate that's how my last week has been." Larkin was forced to miss five games including the one in which he was injured, four of which the Wings lost.
Larkin declined comment on a number of matters, including the fact that his teammate David Perron was the only player involved in the fracas who drew supplementary discipline from the NHL's Department of Player Safety after he cross-checked Senators defenseman Artem Zub in the face in response to seeing Larkin splayed on the ice. (Perron was suspended six games, which he's appealing.) Asked if anyone on the Senators reached out to him, Larkin only said, "There were a lot of text messages and calls and I didn't want to look at a lot of them, to be honest with you."
Larkin has a history with Joseph, the hard-nosed forward who ran him into the boards from behind in the season-opener two years ago, which happened to be Larkin's first game since his neck injury. Larkin responded by punching Joseph in the head. Larkin said Tuesday that Joseph, who was then with the Lightning, "plays on the line of being in your face and I'm sure that's how he feels he has to play."
"I don't know," said Larkin. "I don't have a problem with Mathieu Joseph."
Larkin's problem is with the NHL. If the league is supposed to protect its players, he doesn't think it's doing a very good job of it. He pointed to two other recent incidents where Kyle Connor of the Jets was taken out by a knee-on-knee hit from Ryan Strome and Erik Gudbranson of the Blue Jackets was drilled from behind by Nick Cousins and neither aggressor was so much as fined. In the latter case, it was Gudbranson who wound up with a one-game suspension after he took matters into his own hands and went after Cousins later in the game.
"The last week in the league has been pretty eye-opening," Larkin said. "It's been kind of a trend, I guess ... and a highlight for player safety. As a player, I'm obviously closely attached (to it) 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 said his issue isn't with the NHL's refs -- he considers them "the best in the world" -- but with "the message being sent down from the top (about) what is safe and what's not and how to discipline it. There's a lot of questions there, and it's kind of scary as a player."
"And this instance, watching it back, I wasn't really doing anything," Larkin said. "I was just trying to make a play on the puck and just standing there, really, so I don't really have an answer. Going back to my last comments, how do you protect yourself? Who's protecting you? There's a lot of unanswered questions in our sport right now."
