The NHL's U.S.-born influence (1918-2008)

by James Mirtle on Dec 1, 2008 5:22 PM CST Comment 5 comments

I owe a big thank you to Gabe Desjardins who came up with a lot of the data that I'll be using over the next few days in related posts. And if you haven't seen them, please take a look at my posts from last week looking at this year's NHL demographics and those from 10 years ago.

All-time, this is how the Canada-U.S. birthplace divide splits, with the percentage of total NHL games played being used as the measuring stick:

Canada-us-born_medium

Looking at the data, one of the biggest catalysts for more U.S.-born NHL players in the league really seems to be expansion from the Original Six, as there were some really lean years for American players leading up to that point.

We are currently at an all-time peak for American representation in the NHL.

Let's throw the Europeans in there (from the Big Five countries of Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden and Finland only):

Northam-europe_medium

Looking at the data, it's easy to see that the U.S. will pass all five of those European nations combined in the near future.

I have incredible access to the number of games played by birthplace based on things like province and state back to the beginning of the NHL, so I'll do my best to get into that over the next few days. If there's a graph or analysis you'd like to see here, let me know.

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Great stuff, James. Very interesting. Fascinating how the euros dip hard following the lockout, and don’t recover. Obviously the KHL’s got a hand in it over the past six or seven months, but there must be more at work here. It can’t all be blamed on the loss of Patrik Stefan. What happens when the league collapses?

Considering all of these numbers and stats, you have a difficult time sleeping, don’t you?

by Donny Rivette on Dec 1, 2008 5:40 PM CST reply actions 0 recs

Obviously, I’d like to see some analysis and comparison of the influence of expansion and/or Stanley Cup at the state level. Did the North Stars leaving Minnesota decrease he number of players coming from this state? Can we quantify the effect of a succesful franchise by comparing different Midwest states? Are we starting to see a Gretzky effect with players coming from the West Coast (I doubt it…)?

Thanks in advance !

by FrenchKheldar on Dec 1, 2008 7:51 PM CST reply actions 0 recs

Minnesota was not without a team for all that long. Given the strong NCAA programs in the area, the lack of an NHL team might have even increased the number of players from that area

Blue and Gold (of Buffalo)

by Ebscer on Dec 2, 2008 11:22 PM CST up reply actions 0 recs

Very interesting stuff, I posted earlier how US growth is taking hold in non traditional US regions.

I’d like to spin the numbers differently. If I take the numbers from the NHL by nationality from 11/26 for the first 10 countries, and divide the total NHL players by the country’s population I get the following