Somebody leaked Dylan Larkin's trade request this summer, and Ryan Hana believes it wasn't the Detroit Red Wings themselves.
"That got out, I don't think from Detroit's side of things," Hana said on the Winged Wheel Podcast.
"Detroit had absolutely zero interest in getting that out there," Hana added, describing a front office that wanted this handled privately.
That's a real detail worth sitting with. This wasn't a franchise trying to pressure its captain publicly into a decision.
Hana said he spoke with multiple people inside the Red Wings organization who described genuine shock when the news became public.
"I talked to so many people from the Red Wings side of things who themselves said, we are shocked by this news," Hana said.
Larkin posted 67 points in 74 games last season, a career-high 34 goals, and has since been stripped of the captaincy while his trade request remains unresolved.
Why the source of the leak actually matters here
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If Detroit genuinely didn't want this public, it changes how the entire situation should be read heading into training camp.
A private disagreement between a captain and his organization becoming a national story isn't something every front office would have wanted, especially one already juggling a GM search at the time.
Detroit finished 41-31-10 last season, 16th overall, under head coach Todd McLellan, a season that ended with real questions before this trade request ever became public.
Interim GM Shawn Horcoff now inherits a situation that became far messier than it needed to be, according to Hana's read on how it originally surfaced.
Whoever did leak this, whether from Larkin's camp, an agent, or somewhere else entirely, clearly wasn't operating on Detroit's timeline or with Detroit's blessing.
That distinction won't resolve Larkin's actual future in Detroit. But it does reframe how this entire saga started, and who's really responsible for turning a private negotiation into a monthslong public story.
Do you believe Detroit's front office genuinely wanted the Larkin trade request kept private?
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