Why It's Hard to See a Jason Robertson for Dylan Larkin Trade Making Sense for Both Teams

Let's roll a rumor around in the palm of our collective hand

In case you missed it, Sean and I had the venerable Prashanth Iyer on AIH this week, and we spent a good deal of time talking about Dylan Larkin’s trade request out of Detroit. It’s a good discussion, as you’d expect given that Prashanth is one of the most Detroit-savvy people out there (and I suppose Sean knows a thing or two about them, too).

But today, I wanted to pour some cold water on the latest thing to get churned out from ye olde rumore mille. Specifically, I wanted to enumerate the reasons that despite Dallas having checked in on Larkin’s asking price with Detroit, I don’t see a recently hypothesized Jason Robertson for Dylan Larkin trade making a lick of sense, as things stand now.

Let’s start with the obvious issue here: Robertson is a left-winger, and Larkin is a center. Positionally, how would Dallas even make this work, given how few top winger options they have as it is?

With Wyatt Johnston, Matt Duchene, and Roope Hintz all slated to center the top nine, you’d pretty much have to ask one of them or Larkin to move over to the wing. The experiment moving Duchene to wing last year didn’t go well, and if everyone’s healthy, Duchene would play a different role than Larkin anyway. Realistically, you’d be looking at displacing Hintz or Johnston in favor of the left-shot Larkin, who will be 30 years old in July. Making a huge trade that also displaces either the player being acquired or one of your top centers is, to put it mildly, a pretty optimistic way to view such a move.

After all, Mikko Rantanen clearly prefers playing with a right-shot centerman, and Johnston is the only real option as things stand. That means you’d be looking at moving Hintz to the wing. And while I actually don’t hate the general idea of Hintz’s speed getting more opportunity out wide, it’s a big ask. Hintz also isn’t quite as much of a goal-scorer as Jason Robertson (who is?), so a Larkin-Hintz duo projects to score less than Hintz-Robertson did. Again, it’s hard to see why such a move would be worth it for a team looking to win now.

This isn’t to disparage Larkin, to be clear. He’s a fantastic two-way center whose term and cap hit project to be great value for whatever team he plays for next year. When a player like that hits the market, any team would be foolish not to look at the price tag and ask about wiggle room. But again, we’re looking at the idea of moving Jason Robertson in exchange for Larkin, so we need to view the potential acquisition through the lens of what’s going out the door as well as what’s coming in.

Speaking of scoring, Larkin has done a lot of it…on the power play. Yes, he’s hit 30 goals for five straight seasons, and that’s not nothing. But when you drill down a tad bit, a whole bunch of that production is coming on the power play: specifically, 57 of his last 129 goals have come on the man-advantage, or nearly half. Larkin hasn’t hit 20 even-strength goals in any of his last four seasons.

(This is a good spot to remind everyone that Jason Robertson has scored 20 even-strength goals in all of his last five seasons, including hitting the 30-goal mark at even-strength just this past year. The dude scores goals like few other players in the league can do.)