Scott Stinson: Are Canada's NHL teams doomed?
Brady Tkachuk, late of the Ottawa Senators, is just the latest star to force his way to an American team. It is a worrisome trend.
By: Scott Stinson
A little over a decade ago, while covering a playoff series between the Anaheim Ducks and Winnipeg Jets, I had an inkling of the future.
Ryan Kesler, the American-born forward, had been traded to Anaheim from the Vancouver Canucks a year earlier.
He had taken some heat on his way out of town, and I wasn’t entirely sure that he would welcome some questions from a Canadian reporter, but in the locker room I asked him how he felt about the move to southern California.
He said it was great. He could walk out his door and be on the beach. He was basically anonymous. And he looked down to his feet, which were in flip-flops. This is what he wore to work, he said.
I mean, technically you could do that in Vancouver for much of the year, but point taken. Canadians like to imagine that playing in a hockey-mad city would be the dream of most players, but the alternative certainly has its appeals.
I thought of that exchange this week after the Ottawa Senators shocked the NHL world by shipping their 26-year-old captain to the Florida Panthers, where he will join his much-reviled brother, Matthew.
It’s just the latest example of a star engineering a move south. Mitch Marner from Toronto, Quinn Hughes from Vancouver, Nik Ehlers from Winnipeg, even the elder Tkachuk a few years ago from Calgary, every one of them a departure that stung their former team.
More could come. Connor Hellebuyck has made none-too-subtle remarks about frustrations with Winnipeg’s recent struggles, and Auston Matthews doesn’t sound entirely thrilled about the future in Toronto, even if he hasn’t asked out. (Yet.) In Edmonton, if the Oilers struggle to begin next season, management will avoid making eye contact with Connor McDavid out of fear he would demand a trade to Vegas or Tampa Bay. Or Dallas.
All of it has given rise to much teeth-gnashing in hockey media this week, as it wonders: Why is this happening? And is Canada screwed?
Let us consider those questions in order. First, the Kesler move of 2014 shows that this is not a totally new thing. Hell, Chris Pronger, a good Canadian boy, requested a trade out of Edmonton to Anaheim two decades ago because it was better for his wife’s television career.
But it is also true that the NHL is starting to become more like the NBA, which has, since LeBron James left Cleveland to join a couple of pals in Miami in 2010, struggled with the fact that star players could force their way out of town, creating a small tier of destination cities — New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco — and, well, everywhere else.
The NHL was thought to be immune to this problem because hockey players don’t make anywhere near the salaries of their basketball counterparts and can therefore be incentivized to stay with the team that drafted them, but as the league’s salary cap has risen sharply in recent years that might be less of a consideration. Add in the fact that U.S. states like Florida and Texas do not have a state income tax, and the financial situation tilts further away from Canada. Brady Tkachuk, having been sent from Ontario to Florida, just got himself a fat pay raise even though his salary is unchanged.
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman also reported this week that he believes some American stars were affected by the heat of the Milan Olympics, where they became quasi-villains on their Canadian teams just by winning the gold-medal final. Friedman’s as plugged in as anyone and I don’t doubt his reporting, but Toronto fans would have cheered just as hard for Matthews post-Olympics, to pick one example, if the Maple Leafs had been good. (They were very much not.)
The big question for Canada’s teams is whether, after the moves of guys like Marner and Tkachuk, the horse can be returned to the proverbial barn. Will American stars in particular be looking to bolt from the Canadian teams that drafted them at the first opportunity? Will even the Canadians and Europeans be lured by the prospect of nicer weather, and lower taxes, and a generally less intense hockey market?
I’ve always thought that the thing about hockey-crazy Canadian markets cuts both ways: it is unpleasant when the team stinks, but when you are on a winning Canadian team you are a hero. (A hero who gets lots of big endorsement contracts.) But when a Canadian team hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1993, it is a lot harder to demonstrate that fact.
One thing that works in the NHL’s favour as it tries to avoid an NBA-style era where a bunch of stars cluster in certain U.S. markets is that there are simply a lot more players on a hockey team than a basketball one. It’s much harder for one NHL player to turn around a franchise’s fortunes.
But the worrisome thing for Canada’s teams, at this moment in time, is that it doesn’t seem to be stopping them from trying.
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I think your premise is sound but it really leads us as well to "Why do most Canadian tram GMs seem to do so poorly in putting together a winning product?"
The egregious example is Stan Bowman who takes a team that made it to two consecutive cup finals, screwing around with successful goaltending, offering Knoblauch a three year extension, and then when the teams performance dropped with lesser goalies fired the coach (with a big severance) and brings in buddy Babcock whose reputation is inconsistent and marginal?
The problem isn't with the players, it's the lack of talent in the front offices.