Calgary's Best Coach and Three Wranglers Just Joined a Chinese Team That Plays in Russia

Two years ago Mitch Love was the best coach in the American Hockey League, and Calgary had him. He won the Louis A.R. Pieri Memorial Award in 2021-22 with the Stockton Heat, then won it again in 2022-23 with the inaugural Calgary Wranglers. Back to back. Nobody in the organization was a better bet to run an NHL bench eventually.

He is now the bench boss of the Shanghai Dragons, a Kontinental Hockey League club that plays its home games in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Three players off last season’s Wranglers roster signed there this month, and Calgary didn’t even receive a bag of pucks for any of them. Under the current arrangement between the two leagues, there was no mechanism for it to.

How a team named for Shanghai ended up in St. Petersburg

This part predates Love entirely, and it is its own kind of strange.

The club was not a normal expansion franchise. It was a diplomatic one. In March 2016, hockey officials signed a protocol in Beijing to bring a Chinese club into the KHL, built specifically to grow the sport ahead of Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics. When the league’s board formally accepted the team that June, the signing ceremony was attended by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Two heads of state, for a hockey club’s paperwork. The team, then called Kunlun Red Star, played its first several seasons out of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, exactly as advertised.

Then COVID happened. On July 14, 2020, the club notified the league that pandemic travel restrictions made it impossible to keep operating out of China, and that it would base itself in Russia for the season instead. That move was announced as temporary.

It has now been six years. The club spent 2020 through 2025 playing out of a 7,000-seat rink in Mytishchi, outside Moscow. In August 2025, under new ownership, it rebranded as the Shanghai Dragons and moved into SKA Arena in St. Petersburg, the largest hockey arena in the world. It returned to China for exactly two games, in March 2026, its first appearances there in six years. Everything else, the practices, the rest of the schedule, Love’s bench, the contracts Frk, Cicek and Ottenbreit signed, happens in Russia.

Daily Faceoff on the KHL's Kunlun Red Star rebranding as the Shanghai Dragons, August 2025

So: a club that exists to grow hockey in China, whose name advertises a Chinese city, currently operates almost entirely out of Russia, because of a pandemic that ended years ago. That was already true before Mitch Love ever answered the phone.

His part of the story starts later, and it happened in this order.

June 2025: a letter

The NHL received a letter containing allegations about Love’s personal conduct and opened an investigation. He was an assistant coach with the Washington Capitals at the time, and the conduct at issue is reported to predate his arrival there.

That summer, with the investigation open, Love interviewed for head coaching vacancies with the Seattle Kraken, the Boston Bruins and the Pittsburgh Penguins. He was, by any reasonable reading of the market, one of the more sought-after names available.

October 2025: a season, gone

The Capitals placed him on leave on September 14 while the league investigated. On October 26 the NHL suspended him for the entire 2025-26 season, and the Capitals fired him that same afternoon.

Capitals PR announcing Mitch Love's team-imposed leave pending the NHL's investigation, September 2025

The league’s stated reason was “conduct detrimental to the league.” The Capitals said only that the decision followed “the findings of an NHL-led investigation into past allegations.” Neither has ever described what the underlying conduct was.

Reporting has. Frank Seravalli, who broke the suspension, reported that an alleged victim, a woman who had been in a relationship with Love, brought allegations of domestic abuse to the league and to teams with coaching vacancies. Multiple outlets followed with the same characterization. It is worth being exact about the standing of that: the NHL and the Capitals have not confirmed it, no criminal charge has been laid, no arrest has been reported, and there is no record of a police investigation.

Love denied the allegations the evening he was fired. “I fully deny the allegations against me,” he said in a statement, adding that he respected the process and accepted both the league’s findings and the Capitals’ decision.

One detail from the suspension matters for everything that follows: the NHL made Love eligible to apply for reinstatement for the 2026-27 season, subject to conditions. There is still a path back to the Show. He just isn’t taking it yet.

January 2026: the one league that isn’t listening

On January 17, the Shanghai Dragons named Love their head coach, on a contract through the end of 2026-27.

Shanghai Dragons naming Mitch Love head coach, January 2026

An NHL suspension is an NHL matter. It does not travel. The KHL is not a signatory to anything that would oblige it to honour a ban handed down in North America, which made it, at that particular moment, the most available job market in professional hockey for a bench boss carrying one.

Note the overlap in the dates. Love’s suspension covers 2025-26 and his reinstatement window opens for 2026-27. His Shanghai deal runs through the same season. Whatever else this is, it is not a man who has left the sport.

The vacancy itself was not manufactured. Gerard Gallant had stepped away from the Shanghai bench on December 30 with a heart condition and did not return; assistant Mike Kelly ran the bench in the interim. That part is ordinary, and sad, and has nothing to do with the rest of this.

July 2026: twelve days

• July 6. Martin Frk signs a two-year deal. He had just put up 30 goals and 30 assists in 66 games as a Wranglers alternate captain, after coming over from a one-year, $775,000 two-way contract with the Flames. Reported terms in Shanghai are roughly 55 million rubles a year, net, plus bonuses.
• July 9. Nick Cicek signs for one year. He’d spent all of 2025-26 in Calgary on a two-way NHL deal, logging 7 goals, 18 assists and 119 penalty minutes across 70 games on the blue line.
• July 18. Turner Ottenbreit signs for one year. He’d arrived in Calgary on a PTO before it turned into an AHL deal, put up thirteen points in 57 games for the Wranglers, and had a previous KHL stint with this same franchise back when it was called Kunlun Red Star.

Shanghai Dragons announcing the signing of Martin Frk, July 2026

Shanghai Dragons announcing the signing of Nick Cicek, July 2026

Shanghai Dragons announcing the signing of Turner Ottenbreit, July 2026

Worth being precise about what this is and isn’t. All three were unrestricted free agents once their AHL deals expired. Nobody was taken from Calgary against Calgary’s wishes, and there is no evidence any of them did anything other than sign the best offer in front of them. Players are allowed to do that.

There is also the matter of Spencer Foo, who played for the Flames and Stockton from 2017 to 2019, and who captained the Shanghai Dragons until leaving on June 4 to sign with HK Sochi. He was there before any of this.

What Calgary got

Nothing.

The NHL suspended its memorandum of understanding with the KHL in March 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and instructed its clubs to cease contact with their KHL counterparts. That suspension has not been lifted. There is no active transfer agreement, which means no fee, no consideration, no compensation of any kind for a 30-goal scorer and two defencemen walking out the door to the same club in a fortnight.

That is not an oversight by the Flames front office. It is the structure. No picks, no futures, no player to be named later, nothing coming back the other way. When the relationship between two leagues is frozen, players leaving one for the other simply leave.

The Wranglers still have to replace what walked out the door: a leading scorer, a physical top-four defenceman, and a veteran body off the back end, restocked out of a system whose entire job is graduating players up to Calgary, not backfilling itself. That part shows up in the standings well before the rest of this story finishes playing out.

Independent commentary. Not affiliated with the Calgary Flames, the Calgary Wranglers, or the NHL. Facts verified against public reporting as of July 2026. The NHL and the Washington Capitals have not publicly described the allegations against Mitch Love; reporting characterizing them is attributed above to the journalist who reported it. Love denies the allegations. No criminal charge or arrest has been reported.