Notes: Larkin, teammates enjoy D-Boss bobblehead

DETROIT -- The 12-year-old version of Dylan Larkin would have loved Monday night at Little Caesars Arena.
Not only is 21-year-old Larkin playing center and leading the Red Wings in points, tonight his YouTube video featuring a young "D-Boss" is immortalized in bobblehead form.

"They did a good job on it," Larkin said. "I laughed. Hopefully, it loosens us up a little bit and we have a good night. They did a good job. It's pretty right on with everything.
"I thought it was a fun idea. I think the fans will enjoy it. The guys certainly will enjoy it. I was open to it. I wanted them to do it right, though, and they did a good job."
Teammate Justin Abdelkader agreed that the likeness to the kid in the video is remarkable.
"They got all the details," Abdelkader said, looking at the bobblehead. "They got the inside-out hat, they got the torn jeans, the American flag draped over his back. I think they covered it all.
"I saw pictures, but seeing this in person, it looks even better. You've got to get one of these for sure. This is a must-have."

Larkin admits that he was not thrilled when the video was unearthed during his rookie season.
"I was a little embarrassed at first," Larkin said. "The guys gave me a hard time. I still remember, I was living with Riley Sheahan at the time and he came in my room that morning -- I think we had the day off, or it was a practice day -- and he saw it on Twitter. He was one of the first ones to see it, and it was the first time I saw it. My stomach dropped. As soon as I saw it, I knew exactly what it was. I didn't need to watch it. They loved it. It took me a little bit to warm up to it, but people seemed to enjoy it. That's what I used to do when I was a kid."
Larkin and his friend, Evan Gizinski, a.k.a. EG Slayer, have gotten more than 155,000 views of their video from "The Dungeon," or the Gizinskis' basement.
"We were having a sleepover and what happened six or seven years later is exactly what we wanted to have happen that night," Larkin said. "I don't know how many views it has on YouTube but it has quite a few. That's exactly what we wanted to have happen."
Larkin said his teammates started calling him D-Boss and still do but he doesn't mind. It's a nickname he came up with right on the spot as he and Gizinski were doing the video.
Larkin gave the bobblehead his stamp of approval but Gizinski isn't as excited about it, according to Larkin.
"He's mad he got cropped off the couch," Larkin said.
The first 7,500 fans at the game against the Florida Panthers will get the D-Boss bobblehead tonight.
LARKIN'S LESSONS: While Wings fans appreciate the bounce-back season that Larkin is having this year with four goals among 23 points in 29 games, it was a difficult process to get to this point.
Larkin dazzled with a team-leading 23 goals among 45 points in his rookie season in 2015-16, then struggled with 17 goals among 32 points last season. He also went from plus-11 to minus-28.
"His first year, the first part of the year, nothing went wrong, everything went right," Wings coach Jeff Blashill said. "He never made any mistakes. Everything went in the net. It just went as right as right could be for about 50 games. For about the last 30 he started making mistakes in terms of not stopping coming back into his end and starting picking up some minuses that way, not stopping on pucks, cheating for offense a little bit. When you're into March, it's too late to start teaching lessons, you teach them at the beginning of the year.
"At the end of the year I sat down, certainly to myself and to Ken Holland and with Dylan Larkin, our job is to make sure he becomes the complete player that's going to make him special in this league and to help him with that. He wants that, so we went through the process last year. It's not always easy. When you come to the bench and you get sat during periods of the game because you made a mistake, when you come to the bench and get told you made mistakes, you come to the bench and get shown video after the games, it eats away at your confidence.
"So generally in order to break habits you need immediate consequences or you need the teaching. Those are three ways I know to do it: ice time, talking and video. But it eats away at people's confidence and generally they take steps backwards before they take steps forwards. I've seen it time and again with most of these guys and it just happened to be in the American League."
Because Larkin has elite speed, one of the things he actually had to learn to do was to stop, which goes counter to the natural instincts of a speedster.
"Going back to when I first saw him play at Michigan, after he was a draft pick of ours, I said to myself watching him on TV was he was going to have to learn how to stop," Blashill said. "Just a maturation of a young player that you have to learn how to stop and not just flow and pick up speed. I think it's been a process over three years and he's been way better at it now than he was when he first got to us.
"I also think the center position allows him to come back into the zone and kind of hunt the puck a little bit. When you're a winger you got to put the brakes on every time. When you're a center you can come back in and feel where the puck's going and anticipate jumping on the puck and get out. That's what made Pavel (Datsyuk) really good as a centerman, his defensive instincts of where the puck was going were great and I think that's what helps Larks and helps AA (Andreas Athanasiou)."
Blashill has helped players through these lessons before, but it was generally in the minors, which is a much easier place to make mistakes and learn these things.
"These young players that come into the league, especially ones that have great success early and things come to them easy at times, then they get put up to a level where it's hard to sustain if you haven't built that great foundation," Blashill said. "A lot of the guys that have had to go through the American League, or even some of these other guys like (Henrik) Zetterberg, Zetterberg didn't come over until he was older, he had a chance to learn some of these lessons.
"When you're learning the lessons under the spotlight of this every single day, it's hard. You got to be willing to understand that you have to get better in order to get better, but it's hard when there's people on you all the time to do that. You get your back up a little bit so that's where I really compliment Dylan, that while there's moments of getting his back up just like any human being, he accepted the fact that he wanted to become the very best player he could be."
Blashill has said before that things started to coalesce for Larkin in the last 20 games of the season and then the opportunity to continue working together at the world championships solidified many of those principles.
"When I went to the world championships with him, I think that helped us in this sense, it wasn't necessarily planned but as the tournament went along, he was our go-to guy and my go-to guy," Blashill said. "He matched up against the other teams' best players, he played PK and PP and because of that, he was out late in games whether we were winning or losing. I just think that helped our, just understanding of each other even to a greater degree."
PANTHERS JUST LIKE THE WINGS: The Wings and Panthers are division rivals and could very well be fighting each other for the final playoff spot in the Atlantic.
The two teams are very similar through 29 games with the Wings in fifth place in the division at 11-13-5 and the Panthers in sixth place at 11-14-4.
"We always have good games with those guys," Abdelkader said. "Always tough divisional games. Obviously, both teams would like to be higher in the standings. It's a big game for both teams."
Both teams are coming off of tough losses - the Wings dropped a 6-1 contest to the St. Louis Blues this past Saturday afternoon and the Panthers suffered a 7-3 defeat at the hands of the Colorado Avalanche Saturday night.
The Wings got a 3-2 shootout win in Florida on Oct. 28 and will face the Panthers two more times after tonight, Jan. 5 at Little Caesars Arena and Feb. 3 in Florida.
David Booth, who was originally drafted by the Panthers in the second round of the 2004 NHL Entry Draft, missed Saturday's game with a lower-body injury but participated in the morning skate.
Blashill said he believed Booth was available. If not, Tyler Bertuzzi will play.
Luke Witkowski has finished his 10-game suspension but practiced with Xavier Ouellet as extra defensemen in the morning skate.