Another day, another NHL star asks out of the only franchise he has known.

And to the shock of no one, it’s an American player from a Canadian team headed to one of the league’s preferred destinations in the southern United States.

In losing captain Brady Tkachuk to the Florida Panthers for a few draft picks over the weekend, the Ottawa Senators followed in a growing NHL trend. What feels different here compared to other cases of stars wanting to leave Canadian cities — Quinn Hughes from Vancouver; Johnny Gaudreau, Matthew Tkachuk and Rasmus Andersson from Calgary; Nikolaj Ehlers and Jacob Trouba from Winnipeg; and Mitch Marner from Toronto, among others — is that Brady Tkachuk’s now-former team appears on the rise.

In fact, the Senators were seemingly well-positioned to do some real damage in the Atlantic Division and Eastern Conference in the coming years, given the age of their core and how well they played in the second half. Even their disappointing first-round loss to the Carolina Hurricanes consisted of four tight, hard-fought games, a better showing than other clubs managed against the eventual Stanley Cup champions.

Brady Tkachuk to the Florida Panthers

Sean McIndoe and Sean Gentille

Prior to the Tkachuk trade, Ottawa’s odds of winning the Cup next season weren’t dramatically lower (18 to 1) than Florida’s (11 to 1). Now the Panthers have been boosted up into a tie for second (with the Colorado Avalanche) behind only the Hurricanes, and the Senators have fallen back to 22 to 1, closer to the middle of the pack.

Perhaps Senators GM Steve Staios can now flip the acquired picks — three first-rounders and a second — for enough help to fully replace Tkachuk. And perhaps it’s a blessing that Tkachuk asked out when he did, with two years left on his deal and his value this high.

But in what figures to be a very complex NHL offseason with one of the worst free agent classes in recent history, competition for top talent will be fierce. And increasingly, stars are using their no-trade and no-movement clauses not only to leave Canadian teams but also to block the possibility of going to one at all.

The whys behind players not wanting to play in Canada are varied and hotly debated, especially north of the border. I laid out some of the most prominent causes when we were in the midst of yet another Sun Belt Cup Final, and they boil down to a combination of media attention, weather, taxes and even politics.

The other key factor is that Canadian teams have struggled to consistently contend in the NHL’s salary cap era, having not won a championship in 33 years and appearing in the Cup Final roughly half as many times as they should have based on their representation in the league. But the Senators struggled for years to get to this point, on the cusp of contention, and Tkachuk — drafted No. 4 in 2018 — was a central part of that long process.

To have him pull the plug at 26 years old does not fit with the notion out there that the Canadian teams need to be better on the ice to keep their top players. It’s telling, too, that when today’s stars give their list of preferred destinations — including Detroit Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin recently — a team like the Montreal Canadiens, a franchise filled with young talent that just reached the 2026 Eastern Conference finals, isn’t among the choices.

Add in the uncertain situations with the Oilers’ Connor McDavid, the Leafs’ Auston Matthews and the Jets’ Connor Hellebuyck in Winnipeg, and there are a lot of arrows across the league pointing south. The bulk of the exodus is comprised of American players, too, who made up a record 30 percent of the NHL’s membership this season.

The Canadian fear of losing talent to U.S. markets isn’t new. In the 1990s, it centered on entire franchises chasing the money south, with the Quebec Nordiques relocating to Denver in 1995 and the original Jets going to Phoenix a year later. The NHL lacked a salary cap then, and the Canadian dollar was worth just 70 cents, meaning teams based in Canada were paying out salaries at a far higher rate while often getting outbid for talent.

At the time, other Canadian teams in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa also appeared endangered, and those small-market clubs had to shed talent to stay solvent. While some of the players who left town were American, the landscape was much different with a free agency age closer to 30, only 15 percent of the NHL born in the U.S. and a relative lack of no-trade and no-movement clauses compared to today.

While still more than 40 percent of NHLers are Canadian, giving the seven teams in Canada a pool of “hometown” candidates to draw from, Americans are projected to overtake them in the next 10 to 15 years. That’s happening for a lot of reasons, including population differences and the explosive growth of general hockey interest in the U.S., but it’s also true that Canadian participation is falling at the youth level. High costs are one key factor here, but there’s also been a concerted push into other sports: Canadians are following the NFL more than ever, the success of the MLB’s Blue Jays and NBA’s Raptors have boosted baseball and basketball participation, and the country is also a rising power in both tennis and soccer.

Why the Senators traded Brady Tkachuk to the Panthers in an NHL blockbuster

Julian McKenzie

All of that is to to say, this trend isn’t going anywhere. Hockey is going to continue to become more American, not just in the NHL but elsewhere, and the Canadian-based teams are going to have to adjust to compete in that evolving terrain. That could mean GMs in places like Calgary and Ottawa shifting their focus to more heavily scout and draft from Canadian and European pipelines. It could mean thinking twice before acquiring an American star without at least having a conversation about their willingness to stay long-term.

Even with those adjustments, this shift creates an optics problem for the NHL if the talent continues to flow in one direction, again and again. Canada remains a massive revenue-driver for the league, boasting three of the NHL’s four most valuable teams and generating billions in TV revenue. That cash cow could be diminished if some of these franchises simply become feeder outfits for U.S.-based super teams.

What’s fascinating is that when the NHL introduced the salary cap in 2005, it was to avoid that type of tiering. The goal, instead, was to help the league’s smallest markets stay competitive, creating a level financial playing field not only for the Canadian clubs but the struggling new franchises in the south. With every team able to spend to the same ceiling annually, however, it had the knock-on effect of creating other systemic imbalances, including the extreme rise of trade protections as GMs attempted to compensate players in ways other than giving them larger salaries.

While it would be easy to vilify individual players like the Tkachuk brothers who are helping drive this trend, they’re more a symptom than a cause. For decades, NHL teams asked players to be loyal and commit on long-term deals that locked them up from their teenage years until retirement. These teams then acted in cutthroat ways to buy out or otherwise dump them, however, when their play declined.

That paradigm has now changed entirely, to where star players (and their agents) realize they hold the cards, especially with how free agency has been hollowed out and how vital the trade market has become to building a top team.

Whether that shift has created a permanent imbalance in the league, with talent flowing from north to south, remains an open question. But it’s one worth asking yet again, as another top player heads to Florida and another Canadian team’s GM is left scrambling to fill a gaping roster hole.