Whether it’s on the ice or in the trophy cabinet, American hockey players have been rapidly melting Canada’s long-time dominance of the sport.
When Team USA and Canada meet on the TD Garden rink in Boston Thursday night in the championship game of the inaugural 4 Nations Face-off (8 p.m. ET on ESPN), it’ll mark one more instance of the neighbors appearing to be near-equals in the sport invented north of the border.
“There’s two really good teams that are going to compete extremely hard and do everything they can to win,” U.S. coach Mike Sullivan told reporters on Wednesday. “How good is that for hockey? It’s an unbelievable celebration of hockey. Both teams will be emotionally invested.”
The NHL, the world’s most elite and lucrative league, has long been dominated by Canadian players. But in just the past few years, the gap between Canadian- and U.S.-born players has dramatically reduced.
As recently as the 2021-22 season, there were 481 Canadian-born players who took the NHL ice — 438 forwards and defenseman and 43 goaltenders. That was 161 more the total number of American-born players that season — 320, made up of 294 skaters and 26 between the pipes.
The gap has decreased every season since and is now down to 107 a little more than halfway through this 2024-25 NHL campaign. So far this NHL season, there have been 359 skaters and 27 net minders born in Canada compared to their 260 and 19 American counterparts.
Thursday’s matchup will pit the best against the best.
“It’s the USA vs. Canada, so it’s what you come to expect,” American defenseman Jacob Slavin said. “I think for all of us, it’s probably one of the coolest games we’ve ever played in. So I can only imagine it’s going to be that intensity again.”
Earlier in the tournament, the Americans beat Canada in Montreal in a game marked by three fights breaking out in the first nine seconds of play.
American forward Jack Hughes anticipates the environment to be “crazy” once again.
“Probably the same same energy, same physicality, same speed, probably just a little bit more,” he said. “And I know they’re excited to get us again and we’re looking forward to playing them again.”
Tonight’s 4 Nations Face-off final could very well be a preview of games in Milan a year from now when NHL players make their first appearance on Olympic ice since 2014.
The world’s top hockey players were first allowed to be in the Olympics in 1998 but the NHL, its players union, the world body governing international hockey and the International Olympic Committee couldn’t come to terms for the pros to play in 2018 and 2022.
Though the hockey world hasn’t yet seen the United States’ recent surge on Olympic ice, it has been found in results of the IIHF World Junior Championship (WJC), an annual post-Christmas tournament featuring the world’s best teenage players.
Team USA has won the past two gold medals and taken the top spot four times in the past nine competitions.
“Our team’s helped grow the game here in this country already,” said American forward Matthew Tkachuk, the son of 538-goal scorer Keith Tkachuk and brother of teammate Brady Tkachuk. “And I think a win can just knock that door right down and open up a whole new wave of hockey players throughout the whole country.”
While the United States National Team Development Program (NTDP) has been clearly excelling in identifying and coaching elite talent, that work hasn’t necessarily yet resulted in mass growth at the most grassroots level.
There were 1,641 high schools offering boys ice hockey with 32,996 players suiting up in 2023-24, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Those levels have been relatively unchanged for the past decade and a half.
United States Hockey League (USHL) president and commissioner Glenn Hefferan said the hockey infrastructure still isn’t big enough yet.
He dreams of a “Friday Night Lights” hockey culture that can someday be the game’s bedrock in similar fashion that high school gridiron action underpins all of football.
“It boils down to access,” Hefferan told NBC News on Wednesday from Boston. “Every single youth athlete experiences their moment in a sport for the first time in their hometown, whether it’s soccer, baseball, football, basketball and lacrosse. That’s not the case for hockey unless you live in places like Minnesota. So we need Kentucky to have more ranks, Tennessee to have more ranks, Florida to have more ranks.”
And of course, the U.S. still needs to break through at the highest level of play.
Since the “Miracle on Ice” team of 1980, the U.S. has yet to capture Olympic gold again — though America came agonizingly close with silver medal efforts in 2002 and 2010.
Team USA won the 1996 World Cup of Hockey.
U.S. coach Sullivan, 56, said his love of hockey can be traced to that 1980 “Miracle” team and hopes his squad can have that same impact on the future of American players.
“That event in USA Hockey inspired a generation of players: my generation,” Sullivan said of that Lake Placid team. “I think this group that we have in our dressing room have an opportunity to do that and inspire the next generation. And I think they recognize that.”
