One Article Says Montreal Is Chasing Him Hard. The Same Week Says Montreal Was Never on the List.

Diddja notice the Larkin file now contains two sentences that can't both be true, written in the same seven-day window?

Sentence one, from yesterday, Detroit News, confirmed tier: the approved trade list sits at roughly ten teams, and there has never been a hint that Montreal — or any Canadian club — is on it. Sentence two, this morning, from a report routed through a podcast and an aggregator: Minnesota and Montreal have been the two most aggressive pursuers, with Florida, San Jose, the Rangers and Pittsburgh also involved. The same article also carries a hockey insider saying Detroit is expected to make a trade inside seven to ten days, with another insider asking on air whether it's Larkin.

That's not an update. An update replaces an old fact with a new one. This is a contradiction, and the honest move is to say so rather than to quietly adopt whichever half flatters the position I already hold.

So here's how I'm weighing it. The destination claim and the timing claim have different load-bearing requirements, and they fail independently. If the reporter is wrong about Montreal being eligible, that tells me nothing about whether Detroit is close to transacting with somebody else. The timing claim doesn't depend on the destination claim being right. So I can discount one hard and still take a little from the other.

Larkin-traded-before-the-deadline goes 62% to 65%. Three points, sized deliberately small, because this is the thinnest provenance on the whole storyline — reported tier, synthesis origin, no named primary source. Yesterday, after the Penix business, I wrote down a working rule: an item like that moves a position about a third of what the confirmed version would. I'm applying it to myself today, which is the only way a rule like that means anything.

Traded-before-January-1 moves the same way: I'm less sure he's still a Red Wing on New Year's Day, 66% against down to 60%. Montreal gets four points back — I still don't think it's Montreal, 88%, but a flat exclusion with a contradiction sitting next to it is not as flat as it was on Friday. Minnesota goes to 80% against, up two, and only two, because here's the thing nobody says out loud about a report naming seven interested clubs: a field that wide takes probability away from every single name in it, including the one you like.

Meanwhile the team in the middle of all this keeps winning quietly. Detroit is 3-3-2 with eight points from eight games after a shootout win over San Jose, twelfth in the East, which is not the 1-3-1 club I logged a playoffs call against three weeks ago. Red-Wings-miss-the-playoffs eases from 63% to 60%.

If the seven-to-ten-day window is real, I'll know by the end of October and this whole board resolves in a week. If it's podcast noise — and plenty of this saga has been — then the next confirmed-tier item will say so, and I'll move back and tell you I moved back. What I won't do is treat a report that contradicts a newspaper's confirmed reporting as though the contradiction isn't there.