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Dmitry Kulikov from Russia poses with Panthers officials after being taken 14th overall.

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Following up on this post breaking down the 2009 draft by nationality, here's a glance at the make up of players selected in the NHL draft in the 30-team era:

Two pretty obvious trends there, just over the past 10 entry drafts: The number of European players picked is declining, from 45 per cent down to only 25, and the number of North Americans is on the rise.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main ones are the increasing strength of the KHL in Russia and a decline in the quality of players coming out of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The KHL war being waged over prospects has been well-documented, but we haven't heard nearly as much about Central European prospects, and it's been my belief for a while that the development systems in that region are in trouble.

And that'll have a big effect on the makeup of the NHL going forward. It already is.

If we graph things out a little differently than above, you can see that the change in Europeans being drafted isn't coming from Sweden or Finland (labelled as Nordic below):

How stark is the contrast? Well, back in 2000, when the NHL went Russian-crazy, there were 20 players from the country picked in the first three rounds. The past three entry drafts, however, with the KHL putting a tight hold on all but their biggest stars, only 23 have been taken total.

Just seven Russian players were taken on Friday and Saturday, down from a high of 41 in 2000, and those that are being picked have expressed a real desire to play in North America. The lone Russian in the top 24 picks this year was Dmitry Kulikov, a trilingual defenceman who still slipped to the Panthers in 14th despite the fact he spent last season in Drummondville of the QMJHL and is focussed solely on making the NHL.

The other Russians drafted were Dmitri Orlov, Igor Bobkov, Sergei Andronov, Alex Avtsin, Anton Klementyev and Mihail Pashinin. Belarussian Kirill Gotovets was taken by the Lightning in the last round.

There were just three Czech players taken, down from a high of 31 in 2001, and four Slovaks, just another sign of those countries' declining fortunes in the game. The Czech Republic, Olympic champs in 1998, was blown out in a couple world junior games earlier this year, and after winning back-to-back golds in 2000 and 2001 have just one bronze medal at the tournament in the past eight years. Slovakia, meanwhile, is in danger of being a relegation team in many international events.

While Russia is curently the top-ranked hockey power in the world, the Czechs are in sixth spot and Slovakia is now ninth, behind Switzerland and Belarus. At the elite level, of the 37 Czech skaters in the NHL that played 50 or more games this past season, half are 30 or older — this in a league where about 70 per cent of the membership is under 30.

Only 13 Slovak players played 50-plus games this season, down from about 20 per season prelockout.

I don't know enough about the development system to know exactly what's gone wrong, but I have heard from those who do that budgets have been cut and more kids have turned to other sports in recent years. It's having an impact on the NHL membership and it's becoming more pronounced in the draft over time. As that happens, more and more teams will pull scouting resources from the regions, something that could impact the number of Central European players we see in the NHL for decades.

The draft is where those trends start, and it's not hard to see where we're headed.

My thanks to regular commenter PRC for passing along the data used in this post. I've been getting more and more great contributions like this over email, and I truly appreciate it. Keep the spreadsheets coming.