Earlier this month, a handful of players from the NHL’s Ottawa Senators were recorded surreptitiously during an Uber ride in Phoenix. The video of their conversation was later published online, reportedly by the driver who was unhappy about the tip they left him, tweeting they were “cheap, entitled kids”.

The leak was bad enough as an invasion of privacy. Worse, was what the players were caught saying: trashing members of their coaching staff and lamenting some of their on-ice play. “Do you notice that when [assistant coach Martin Raymond] runs the video, if you actually do pay attention, he doesn’t ever teach you anything?” defenseman Chris Wideman asked the group.

Following the leak, the players apologized. Uber apologized. Pundits sympathized. Meanwhile, everyone else seemed to quietly understand. The players might have reason to complain, after all – if not about their coaches or their skills, then at least about the fact they happen to be members of the Ottawa Senators, who appear to be the most dysfunctional team in professional sports.

The clues had already been there for a while. In June, news broke that the fiancee of Sens’ centre Mike Hoffman, Monika Caryk, stood accused of harassing Erik Karlsson’s wife, Melinda (Karlsson, at that point, was the team’s captain and only legitimate star). Melinda Karlsson had filed for a peace bond against Caryk, accusing her of posting hundreds of hateful messages about her and her husband on social media, including “numerous statements wishing my unborn child dead.” (This seemed especially awful, given that, in March, the Karlsson’s first child had arrived stillborn.) Caryk and Hoffman denied everything and neither were charged under any laws, but the Senators quickly shipped him (and her, presumably) far away, to San Jose, where he was immediately sent packing again, this time to the Florida Panthers.

While the team can’t be blamed for how its players – and their families – behave in public, the response of the Senators’ owner, Eugene Melnyk, was dismal. In September, Melnyk appeared in a pre-season lookahead interview. Melnyk opined that “right now, we’re kind of in the dumpster;” mentioned Karlsson’s name exactly never; and, as if to remind fans of his overall detachment, wore a Sens jersey that was two seasons out of date. Two days later, Karlsson was traded to the San Jose Sharks. He appeared unable to explain the reasoning behind the trade. “I don’t think that I’ve ever, in my wildest imagination, ever thought that I would leave this place,” he told reporters.

Uber crops up in another story from early October that shows the team’s problems. At the time, the Senators reached a partnership with the platform to offer fans $10 discounts on rides to the stadium. The deal was, in reality, just one move among many the Sens made, including lowering the cost of parking and food “in a bid to better attract fans” for the home opener. The fact that the team were worrying about attendance before the season had even started did not bode well. But then again, location has always been a sore spot for the Senators. Having their home ice in Kanata – a suburb about 25km from Ottawa – has always meant people trickle in late to games, and that third periods are times of exodus, as fans scramble out of the building to beat the traffic home.

But, recently, distance has morphed from merely a geographic problem to a more metaphorical one. Over the last few months, in the aftermath of a disastrous season, fans are growing weary of an organization that, in many ways, seems to have separated itself from its fans and its city. Sometimes, it feels as though the team is barely even real, but rather an unending and bizarre dream.

At the centre of it all is one man: Melnyk. He has owned the Senators for 15 years, many of which he’s spent living far away from Ottawa, in the hockey hotbed of Barbados, and nearly as many of which he’s also spent annoying Sens fans. It’s difficult to nail down exactly when the latest surge of anger at Melnyk began, but it escalated last December, in the run-up to the Winter Classic in Ottawa when Melnyk suggested he might move the team even further away. He also floated the idea of total relocation if attendance didn’t improve or if a proposal for a new downtown arena fell through, and a fresh bout of febrile tension has developed between fans and the organization.

Senators fans responded to Melnyk’s suggestion of relocation by creating a #MelnykOut hashtag and, in classic Canadian fashion, crowdfunded to erect a handful of strongly-worded billboards around Ottawa – a message of disappointment delivered from afar (Melnyk has since said he doesn’t intend to move the team). Spencer Callaghan, who organized the GoFundMe that raised $10,000 to create the billboards, told the Citizen that its message was simple: “We love the team and are willing to go through the ups and downs. What we are not willing to do is support an organization that has lost touch with the fan base and the community.”

By the end of last season – one in which the Senators, who a year prior had made their surprising playoff run, finished second-to-last in the Eastern Conference – even the team’s former captain, Daniel Alfredsson, had joined the anti-Melnyk bandwagon. “We hope we get a new owner,” he told one journalist – a remark Alfredsson later said he believed to have been, much like a certain recorded rideshare conversation, off the record.

When the popular Karlsson was traded, the dumpster that had been smoldering was set ablaze. No amount of Uber deals or concession stand price cuts could fill the rink for the home opener – an estimated 6,000 or so seats stood empty that night.

The 2018-19 season is still young, and the Sens sit a handful of points out of a wildcard spot in the East. Needless to say, the criticisms leveled by the Senators in the backseat of that Phoenix Uber were, dare we say, accurate.

Following the Uber tape leak, the Senators asked the Citizen to remove the video from its website. The paper refused. In apparent retaliation, a Citizen sports reporter was denied access to the team’s charter flight to Tampa Bay. Some Twitter users responded to the story by comparing the move, assumed to have been at Melnyk’s direction, to something another man criticized for being disconnected from reality – Donald Trump – might do. The two men certainly appear to share a dislike for leaked information. As for reality, Senators fans surely hope Melnyk returns to it soon.

