Yesterday, USA won their second straight U20 World Junior Championships, defeating Finland 4-3 in overtime. Afterwards, I was watching the panel with James Duffy and Bob McKenzie discussing what is always talked about when Canada fails and the US succeeds.

Has America become the dominant hockey power in the world?

Among NHL players, the U30s, it’s pretty clear that Canada still holds this claim, winning the last three best-on-best tournaments. Although there are a lot of questions and debate about what the 4 Nations will bring. I see that as a tossup between the US and Canada. The Canadiens have the top-end talent, obviously, but the US is catching up and has a better defense/goalie crew…

But when it comes to youth hockey, you can argue that the youth of the US has already caught up and maybe passed Canada.

This is the third U20 gold medal the Americans have won in five years. And I will argue this was the first time they were definitely superior to Canada….more talent and skill. You can blame all sorts of things for Canada’s downfall, but at the end of the day, the Americans at the WJC were obviously better than Canadians. What’s happening here?

So what’s happening here?

When I was a kid, back in the 70s and 80s, we would send an All-Star team from the Philadelphia area up to Canada every year full of milk and vinegar, nd we would get destroyed by a C division team from Sherbrooke. It was humiliating and very discouraging . At that time, there was no comparison whatsoever.

Things are very different today

It’s easy to say the population of the United States with 340 million versus Canada’s 41 million at some point has to factor into this…just by sheer numbers. In 23-24 USA hockey participation listed their members at 564,468. That number is their highest ever and falls just short of the 600,000 Canada listed in 2010. However, since 2010, Canada has dropped to a current 436,895.

So there’s roughly 130,000 more kids playing hockey in America than in Canada.

But it’s not about your numbers. Look at soccer. In the US, we have over 3 million kids playing soccer. Brazil has just over 1.3 million kids playing soccer… Anyone would be hard-pressed to say that the US is a dominant soccer power over Brazil.

So if it’s not about the numbers…..what is it?

Here’s my theory, and I’ve had this for a long time. I’ve coached a lot of different youth sports. I’ve seen kids that are incredibly athletic and skilled have to choose what sport they want to play. Football, basketball, baseball— these are all easier sports to afford and more revered in the US than hockey. So you get your great athlete like Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley, born in the Bronx, raised in northeastern Pennsylvania with all sports available to him. What is he going to play? It’s highly unlikely he chooses hockey.

The Miracle on Ice victory in 1980 was more than just an incredible win. It got the best athletes who were kids to consider playing hockey.

Many will say it’s financial.

To a large degree it is still way more expensive to play hockey in the US than any other sport. However, it’s getting cheaper all the time, and I don’t really think that’s the biggest problem. I think what makes hockey uniquely difficult to get young kids involved in is that it’s not just playing a sport. It’s playing a sport while ice skating. Skating is the biggest learning curve. It’s not because there aren’t airplane around rinks around like it used to be. There are plenty of rinks around now. It’s that kids aren’t put in skates when they’re one or two years old like they are in Canada as they skate on readily available frozen lakes..

And that brings me to the final reason why Canada still holds the edge to me, but also why the US is gaining rapidly…

Coaching at the youth hockey level.

Once an adult, almost any guy or girl who grill up in the US can inherently coach football, baseball, or basketball. It’s just part of our growing up, and we understand those sports at a certain level that enables us to coach it. We’ve all played all of those sports at some point, whether it’s in gym or just for fun.

Coaching hockey is something that the Canadian parents know inherently how to do. Like coaching soccer comes naturally to parents who grew up in Brazil.

But this is changing…

American youth hockey coaching is perhaps the biggest reason we’re seeing what we’re seeing at the U 20…. And there is one reason for this… and it’s areason that is obvious to anyone who has a kid or knows anyone who has a kid in youth hockey in America.

Former NHLers have settled into lives in America and are coaching youth hockey all over the country. Many of these grow up in Canada. They are handed the job because of their experience and respected status. One of my wife’s friend’s kids is coached by Evgeny Nabokov in San Jose. There are similar parallels to soccer in the US as high-level youth soccer clubs in America have many English-born coaches.

Hockey is such a team sport and success has so much to do with coaching and systems.

Let’s look at Finland for a second. The superior Finnish athlete kid. They are probably playing hockey because that’s definitely where you can make your way into any sort of fame. The NHL pays good money to quality players from Scandinavia.

Consider this. The US and Finland played a very exciting Final last night. The The US has 340 million people. 5.6 million people live in the District of Columbia and Washington, DC. That number equates almost exactly to the number of people that live in Finland. 5.6 million.

That’s like a U20 team from Washington DC, playing a team from the rest of the 50 States of the United States of America.

So the question is this: What is the best hockey country in the world?

Canada has its best athletes choosing hockey at a much higher rate than American kids. That happens once in a while in the US, but not nearly as often…. Yet when you look at the population, maybe those numbers are actually similar. If one out of every 10 great athletes from America chooses hockey, and every great athlete in Canada chooses hockey the number of great athletes will equal roughly the same number of great athlete kids cheering hockey as their sport….. after that it comes down to coaching and commitment and access… and all of those are getting easier

What say you?

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