Another day, another NHL star asks out of the only franchise he has known.<\/p>\n
And to the shock of no one, it\u2019s an American player from a Canadian team headed to one of the league\u2019s preferred destinations in the southern United States.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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 \u2014 is that Brady Tkachuk\u2019s now-former team appears on the rise.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Brady Tkachuk to the Florida Panthers<\/p>\n
Sean McIndoe and Sean Gentille<\/p>\n
Prior to the Tkachuk trade, Ottawa\u2019s odds of winning the Cup next season weren\u2019t dramatically lower (18 to 1) than Florida\u2019s (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.<\/p>\n
Perhaps Senators GM Steve Staios can now flip the acquired picks \u2014 three first-rounders and a second \u2014 for enough help to fully replace Tkachuk. And perhaps it\u2019s a blessing that Tkachuk asked out when he did, with two years left on his deal and his value this high.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> not only to leave Canadian teams but also to block the possibility of going to one at all.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>\u00a0when 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.<\/p>\n The other key factor is that Canadian teams have struggled to consistently contend in the NHL\u2019s 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 \u2014 drafted No. 4 in 2018 \u2014 was a central part of that long process.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s telling, too, that when today\u2019s stars give their list of preferred destinations \u2014 including Detroit Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin recently \u2014 a team like the Montreal Canadiens, a franchise filled with young talent that just reached the 2026 Eastern Conference finals, isn\u2019t among the choices.<\/p>\n Add in the uncertain situations with the Oilers\u2019 Connor McDavid, the Leafs\u2019 Auston Matthews and the Jets\u2019 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\u2019s membership <\/a>this season.<\/p>\n The Canadian fear of losing talent to U.S. markets isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While still more than 40 percent of NHLers are Canadian, giving the seven teams in Canada a pool of \u201chometown\u201d candidates to draw from, Americans are projected to overtake them in the next 10 to 15 years. That\u2019s happening for a lot of reasons, including population differences and the explosive growth of general hockey interest in the U.S., but it\u2019s also true that Canadian participation is falling at the youth level<\/a>. High costs are one key factor here, but there\u2019s also been a concerted push into other sports: Canadians are following the NFL more than ever, the success of the MLB\u2019s Blue Jays and NBA\u2019s Raptors have boosted baseball and basketball participation, and the country is also a rising power in both tennis and soccer.<\/p>\n Why the Senators traded Brady Tkachuk to the Panthers in an NHL blockbuster<\/p>\n Julian McKenzie<\/p>\n All of that is to to say, this trend isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n