Either on the ice or in the trophies cabinet, American hockey players have quickly been melting the dominance of sport for a long time in Canada.
When the United States and Canada team are on the TD Garden track in Boston on Thursday night in the championship game of the inaugural confrontation of the 4 nations (8 pm et in ESPN), it will mark one more instance of the neighbors They seem to be close. The same in the sport invented north of the border.
“There are two really good teams that will compete extremely hard and do everything possible to win,” American coach Mike Sullivan said journalists on Wednesday. “How good is that for hockey? It’s an incredible hockey celebration. Both teams will be emotionally inverted.”
The NHL, the most elite and lucrative league in the world, has been dominated by Canadian players. But in recent years, the gap between players born in Canada and the United States has been drastically reduced.
As recently as the 2021-22 season, there were 481 players born in Canada who took the ICE NHL-438 front and defenders and 43 goalkeepers. That was 161 plus the total number of players born in the United States that season: 320, composed of 294 skaters and 26 between the pipes.
The gap has decreased every season since then and now has dropped to 107 a little more than half of this NHL 2024-25 campaign. So far, this NHL season, there have been 359 skaters and 27 net minds born in Canada compared to its 260 and 19 American homologists.
Thursday’s confrontation will face the best against the best.
“It’s the United States against Canada, so you expect,” said American defense Jacob Slavin. “I think for all of us, it is probably one of the best games we have played. So I can only imagine that that intensity will be again.”
Previously in the tournament, the Americans beat Canada in Montreal in a game marked by three fights that explode in the first nine seconds of the game.
American striker Jack Hughes anticipates that the environment is “crazy” once again.
“Probably the same energy, the same physicality, the same speed, probably just a little more,” he said. “And I know they are excited to get us again and we are eager to play them again.”
The confrontation of the 4 nations tonight could be a preview of the games in Milan within a year when the NHL players make their first appearance in Olympic Ice since 2014.
The best hockey players in the world was allowed for the first time to be in the Olympic Games in 1998, but the NHL, its union of players, the world body that governs the international hockey and the International Olympic Committee could not accept that professionals play in 2018 and 2022.
Although the hockey world has not seen the recent increase in the United States in Olympic ice, it has been found in the results of the IIHF World Junior Championship (WJC), an annual tournament after Christmas with the best teenage players in the world .
The United States team has won the last two gold medals and took first place four times in the last nine competitions.
“Our team helped grow the game here in this country,” said American eaves Matthew Tkachuk, son of the scorer of 538 goals Keith Tkachuk and his brother of his partner Brady Tkachuk. “And I think a victory can hit that door and Open a completely new wave of hockey players throughout the country. “
Although the development program of the National Team of the United States (NTDP) has been clearly protruding in elite talent identification and training, that work has not yet been necessarily in mass growth at the base level more base .
There were 1,641 secondary schools that offered ice hockey to children with 32,996 players that adapt in 2023-24, according to the National Federation of Secondary School Associations of the State. These levels have been relatively unchanged during the last and a half decade.
The president and commissioner of the United States Hockey League (USHL), Glenn Hefferan, said the hockey infrastructure is not yet large enough.
He dreams of a “friday night light” hockey culture that one day can be the base of the game in a similar way that the high school of the high school grid supports all football.
“It is reduced to access,” Hefferan told NBC News on Wednesday from Boston. “Each youth athlete experiences its moment in a sport for the first time in its hometown, whether football, baseball, football, basketball and lacrosse. That is not the case of hockey unless you live in places like Minnesota. Therefore, we need Kentucky to have more ranges, Tennessee to have more ranges, Florida to have more ranges. ”
And, of course, the United States still needs to make their way to the highest level of play.
From the “Milagro On ICE” team of 1980, the United States has not yet captured the Olympic gold again, although the United States approached agonizing with the silver medal efforts in 2002 and 2010.
The United States team won the 1996 World Cup.
The American coach Sullivan, 56, said that his love for hockey dates back to that “miracle” team of 1980 and hopes that his team can have the same impact on the future of US players.
“That event in the USA. Hockey inspired a generation of players: my generation,” said Sullivan about that Lake Planid team. “I think this group that we have in our wardrobe has the opportunity to do so and inspire the next generation. And I think they recognize it. ”
