OTTAWA — It’s becoming an embarrassment, for the NHL and for this noble capital.

The Senators are a laughingstock, a franchise that is rotting from the head down. Owner Eugene Melnyk has buried himself in debt and lawsuits, his frugality unheard of in modern professional sports. But more importantly, the business failings have led to an on-ice product not worthy of the league shield. Enough is enough.

It’s time for the NHL Board of Governors to step in and make Melnyk sell.

That could have been said many times over the past few years, but the latest incident has to be the final one. Melnyk went to Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut in 2017 and claims he was winning so big that the casino wouldn’t cash out his chips. They “induced [the] defendant to continue to gamble,” according to his legal defense. Yup, his defense is the casino made him keep gambling. If that was a legit defense, the casino would be broke.

Of course, Melnyk needs a legal defense because he kept gambling, lost $900,000, and tried to cover the debt with five bank drafts. He then blames the casino in court papers again for not cashing the bank drafts for five months, thus making them “stale.”

Not that this is anything new. Melnyk had a grand opportunity to revive the Senators franchise with a new downtown arena at LeBreton Flats. The current arena all the way out in Kanata, Ontario, about a 40-minute drive west of the stately city, is beyond antiquated. Its location and condition are two pretty good reasons why no one goes.

But it turns out you need money to build a professional sports arena, and it turns out Melnyk didn’t have enough — or wasn’t willing to spend it. After winning the bid to develop the land, the deal fell through. He sued his partners for $700 million, and they countersued him for $1 billion.

According to the countersuit, Melnyk wanted the city to spend $500 million to build the arena, where he would get free rent for 30 years as well as all the money from the naming rights of the rink, plus an “unreasonable degree of control over the LeBreton project.” Shocking they didn’t go for that, right?

Curious how Melnyk got to this place of prominence? He started a pharmaceutical company named Biovail, which specializes in controlled-release drugs. Just as he was buying the Senators in 2003, it was reported his company was paying doctors up to $1,000 to prescribe Biovail products — a claim settled in 2008 for $24.6 million. In 2006, the SEC charged Melnyk’s company with accounting fraud, forcing it to pay $138 million. Melnyk stepped down, paid around $1 million of his own fines, and wasn’t allowed to be the CEO of a publicly traded company for five years.

The hockey operation must be different, right? Well, former chief marketing officer Peter O’Leary filled a $1.55 million lawsuit against him for abusive behavior and withholding bonuses, which quietly went away. And Melnyk called in a celebrity lawyer to defend former assistant general manager Randy Lee during a sexual harassment case. Tough to find good help these days, eh?

If you really want to get into the weeds, how about suspicion of media attacks? When blogger Travis Yost outed some of Melnyk’s financial troubles in 2013, all of Yost’s blog posts were deleted, as was his Twitter account. According to Yost and confirmed by SBNation, the hacks went back to an IP address in the Ukraine, associated with a domain that was associated with a charity for which Melnyk was listed as the “honorary director.” Though no one could verify any direct connection between Melnyk and the hack, and it could be entirely coincidental, it was certainly odd.

Well, how about the capital city’s old broadsheet, the Ottawa Citizen, which last year posted a video on its website of some Senators players talking trash about the organization, originally published by the Uber driver who took it. The video eventually was taken down, but that came after more than a dozen Twitter bots were found to be attacking the Citizen and defending Melnyk. Maybe a coincidence …

Melnyk also kicked almost all of the media off the team charter — actually, probably a good thing, even though the reporters’ parent companies were paying for it — and snapped at TSN’s Brett Wallace, saying he was going to “bury” the reporter after he asked questions about withheld bonuses.

With that background, realize now that Melnyk has found a way for his team to not only be last in the league in salary-cap spending at around $70 million, but the real money they’re spending is somewhere short of $50 million. Poor Thomas Chabot, the terrific 22-year-old defenseman who just signed an eight-year, $64 million deal. He might want to get his trade list ready.

But don’t worry, Melnyk just took another $165 million loan and said his club is “all-in for a five-year run of unparalleled success — where the team will plan to spend close to the NHL’s salary cap every year from 2021 to 2025.”

At this point, the league shouldn’t let him get there. The NHL has to make Melnyk sell.

Preview Party

Another season is upon us, which means here at the The Post, we had another comprehensive NHL Preview section. It ran in Thursday’s paper, but check out all the stories here.

In there are some (gulp!) predictions, including division outcomes, postseason outcomes, and some awards. I’d already like to redo some of the picks, but they’d probably be wrong, too!

Rolling Leafs

It seems as if hockey in Toronto never has a dull moment. All during the summer and into training camp, it was about Mitch Marner’s contract situation (and refusal to sign an offer sheet). Then the regular-season opener comes, and the Maple Leafs name John Tavares as the captain.

And then Auston Matthews, he of the drunken, immature nonsense from the spring finally coming to light, manages to score in his fourth straight season-opener — only the fourth player in league history to do so, joining the tremendous Dit Clapper, Dave Andreychuk and Sergei Fedorov. Never stops up there.

Stay Tuned . . .

. . . to the Sabres? I don’t think much of their chances up in Buffalo this year, but I might eat my words if Rasmus Dahlin keeps making plays like this one. It’s this type of talent that made him the No. 1-overall pick in 2018, and it would be a nice lift for the downtrodden organization to see the 19-year-old come into his own this season.

Parting Shot

There is the regular, over-the-top homer-ism from Bruins play-by-play man Jack Edwards that is so distasteful. But then there is saying that Roman Polak going head-first into the boards was “bad hockey karma.” Gross. Good news is that after Polak was taken off on a stretcher, he did have feeling in his extremities. That must make Edwards feel better about what he said, right?