This whole offseason is shaping up to be brutal for the Flames. Sounds like Toffoli, Backlund, and Hanfin are also all going to be leaving.

Toxic culture. It goes well beyond the team, the owners and executives are real pieces of work too. Culture spills downwards, and affects all areas of an organization.

Canada also has slightly higher taxes than some states do, so Canadian players especially want to play in those low tax US jurisdictions, and then bring the USD back to Canada in the off-season. Plus there's nothing like Winnipeg or Calgary in February, when you could be playing in Florida, California, Vegas or in the desert. Plus you won't have Eric Francis or Steve Simmons chasing you around everytime you go on a bender on your back to back night off and have it make national news. No one in the south gives a fuck, you still get the full rockstar treatment, your blonde bombshell likes South Beach in the winter, and you otherwise can live quietly until you go back to Canada in the summer and live like a god.

Then the whole bettman thing. Whether or not you believe something's up, I mean the way things have unrolled the past five or six years, there's clearly something going on. The owners don't give a shit, because the money is flying around. Vegas they got half a bil split 30 ways, Seattle they got $650m split 30 ways. Calgarys ownership had a big hand in that too. With big buy ins like that, obviously their investors want some returns. You got all this gambling shit, some of the US broadcasting agreements have gone sideways so they especially needed to attract high revenues to attract bids, so..