When it comes to money or individual quality of the players though I'm not convinced. Many SHL went bankrupt over the last years or are still near bankrupt. None of them have money the money to actually hold onto their best players.
What SHL teams went bankrupt? I can recall a few instances of teams going bankrupt or losing their license to compete in Hockeyallsvenskan because of a crap financial situation some time after being demoted from the SHL/SEL: Västerås, Björklöven and — most recently — Karlskrona springs to mind, but no SHL team has gone bankrupt in modern times, per my knowledge.
Karlskrona was a very notable case where they were absolutely screwed by the SHL, however. Once they’d been promoted to the SHL, they were forced to expand their arena in order to have it fulfill the minimum requirements of capacity. I don’t know about all the details, I think the cost of expanding the arena was carried by the taxpayers, but I’d guess that the running costs likely increased with the new arena and weighed down the club following demotion and played into their financial troubles mounting, in addition to the harsh reality of moving from SHL money to HA money. No team prior to Karlskrona, nor since, have been forced to expand their arena following SHL promotion. It’s been more of a suggestion to Oskarshamn, which they’ve ignored.
At any rate, Karlskrona wasn’t an SHL team when they were demoted due to poor finances.
It’s true the SHL obviously can’t really compete with the KHL and the NLA for top names, otherwise we’d have seen more of them choosing to play in the league. Teams would probably have to overpay the Wallmarks etc by a sizable amount in order to make the SHL seem as lucrative an option as Switzerland is, due to its low taxes. On the other hand, teams seem to do a whole lot of tax planning, through pension funds mainly, which I think helps them keep some players who otherwise would scoot off abroad. It seems that SHL teams many times will boast better talent depth through their rosters than teams from the NLA. Of course the increased amount of foreign players allowed should close that gap considerably.
As to the claim Tappara would be a bottom tier team in the SHL: don’t feed that troll.
