The American Hockey Revolution – Wall Street Journal

President Obama needled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month by suggesting that the United States was better at hockey than its Northern neighbor.

“Where’s the Stanley Cup right now?” Obama asked. “I’m sorry, is it in my hometown with the Chicago Blackhawks? In case you Canadians were wondering, where is it?”

Trudeau made a meek reference to the higher number of Canadian born players on the Blackhawks’ cup winning team, but it was a feeble comeback. Obama’s taunts underline a looming truth: Americans are becoming a stronger force in hockey. In fact, 2016 may go down as the year the U.S. truly began its takeover of the National Hockey League.

Never mind that this year, for the first time since 1970, no Canadian team made the NHL playoffs, which started Wednesday. Forget that no Canadian team has won the cup since 1993. It’s everything: Not only did Blackhawks forward Patrick Kane become the top scorer this year, the first time ever an American has done it, there were also more Americans than any other nationality among the league’s top 10 scorers.

The No. 1 pick in this year’s draft will almost certainly be Auston Matthews. The 18-year old prodigy would become only the seventh American to go first in the draft, but the third in the last 10 years. He’ll also be the first No. 1 pick to come from the decidedly untraditional hockey hotbed of Scottsdale, Ariz., instead of the U.S. hockey cradles in the upper Midwest or Northeast.

For the last three years running, roughly a quarter of all NHL players in the league have been American, the highest proportion on record, and there are more players registered with USA Hockey than ever before.

Things look a lot different today than they did about 25 years ago.

Mike Modano, the leading American-born goal scorer in NHL history and the No. 1 pick in 1988, remembers moving to Dallas with the Minnesota North Stars in 1993.

“At the start, it was really just a novelty,” he said, recalling that fans didn’t know how to watch the game and the radio and TV broadcasters didn’t know how to call the plays. “There was a little bit of frustration at the beginning. We were starting from scratch.”

Back then, there were fewer than 1,000 hockey players in the whole state registered with USA Hockey, and Modano could count on one hand the number of ice rinks in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. As of last year, there were 13,500 registered players in Texas, and there are now nine rinks in the area, including seven that are operated by the first-place Dallas Stars.

Of course, those numbers still pale in comparison with Canada’s. There were more players registered with Hockey Canada last year than all the players, coaches and officials combined in the U.S.

Canadians have long rolled their eyes at their neighbors’ ambitions. Canadian teams don’t often have to rely on miracles to win games. There’s also a sense of ownership over the game up North that some see as arrogance.

Don Cherry, former coach of the Boston Bruins and a longtime NHL commentator, once ridiculed Americans for how little they knew about hockey. He recalls scoffing from the bench when he was a player with the Hershey Bears American Hockey League team in Pennsylvania in 1954. During a game against the Pittsburgh Hornets, he heard fans say players were “dribbling” the puck down the ice, instead of the proper “stickhandling.”

But today, it’s Canadians who are shifting their approach to the game as the U.S. makes its presence felt.

“It’s changing the character of the game,” Cherry said. “We used to call them hockey sweaters, but the Americans called them jerseys, so now we all call them jerseys. The jargon has all changed.”

There are signs that hockey’s primacy up North can’t be taken for granted. A survey released in 2013 by Hockey Canada and equipment-maker Bauer Hockey Inc., reported that 90% of Canadian children weren’t playing hockey. The findings set off a round of hand-wringing across Canada, which might be the country’s second favorite pastime, after playing the sport itself.

Cherry is a big Canada booster and sees no end to the country’s hockey supremacy. He points to the last two Olympic gold medals, won by Canada—the last one easily—and the ability of a country with a population one-tenth the size of the U.S. to keep churning out high-end talent.

“You have to realize that the only thing Canadians are noted for really in the world is hockey,” he said. “There’s really no comparison. No country can touch us.”

But if current trends continue, the U.S. might get close.

Write to Vipal Monga at vipal.monga@wsj.com