O say can you see America catching up to Canadian ice hockey supremacy?
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.
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.
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