Quinn Hughes and the NHL's American exodus from Canada

Quinn Hughes left Vancouver for Minnesota last December, and by the time the NHL's 2026-27 season gets under way on Tuesday, he no longer looks like an isolated case. American-born players are choosing American clubs over Canadian ones, and the league has no tidy explanation for why.

Jim Rutherford, the Canucks' president of hockey operations, addressed the Hughes departure in April without settling the question of what drove it. The guessing inside the game points to this year's Winter Olympics, or further back to the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off, or simply to the political chill between the two countries. Nobody has produced a single cause that fits.

The unease is not new — only its direction is. In September 1925, Frederick Wilson, sports editor at the Globe, wrote about Canadian fans' fear that the new American clubs entering the league, in New York and Boston, would buy up the best players. "Will it be a matter of money?" was his headline. He told his readers not to worry.

"It will be some years before the [US] will be in a position to furnish players," Wilson wrote. For the best part of a century he was right: Canada supplied the talent, the American clubs supplied the money, and the players stayed put.

That balance has now turned. The United States develops its own players in sufficient numbers, and a growing number of them would rather play for a club at home than for one of the seven Canadian franchises. Toronto, founded in 1917 and still working out of the 18,800-seat Scotiabank Arena, and Ottawa, founded in 1992 with the 18,655-seat Canadian Tire Centre as home, are among the Canadian sides opening the campaign under that same shadow.

If the drift holds, the pressure lands hardest on the Canadian clubs least able to offer what a player wants beyond a contract. Vancouver has already found that money is no longer the whole answer.