Sounding the alarm on the state of hockey in North America

Credit: Chris Young/CHL

With another Thanksgiving upon us, we’re again served with a reminder of one more thing the United States just does better than Canada – family, food and football all baked into a built-in four-day weekend. It’s the best.

In all seriousness, Thanksgiving offers one of the few quiet moments of the year to pause and reflect, to acknowledge and express gratitude. It’s also an opportunity to take stock of where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re heading.

If you’ll oblige, I’m incredibly grateful for family, for health, and certainly for the insanely good fortune to work in a sport that I’ve played and spent nearly every waking minute thinking about since I first learned to skate at age four in Philadelphia.

But, for the first time, I’m concerned about the future of the game. I truly believe hockey has arrived at a crossroads. Yes, right now, here in 2024. And the decisions made over the next 12 months by the game’s stakeholders will determine where (or even whether) hockey sits in the hierarchy of North American sports over the next 12 years.

Sound hyperbolic? Maybe. Maybe not.

The recent landmark change in NCAA eligibility has stirred up a series of existential questions about hockey on both sides of the border. And this week’s CHL-USA Prospects Challenge in London and Oshawa only further exacerbated the feeling. I can’t be the only one feeling it.

You see, it wasn’t that the U.S. contingent was swept by their Canadian junior counterparts – a 9-3 drubbing in aggregate over two nights, in which the shot total partway though Game 2 at 26-5 told the real story of a two-game series that wasn’t very close. CHL prospects skated circles around a middling American crop and physically punished and intimated them. It was a clinic.

Really, the results were immaterial. That isn’t sour grapes. I’m a proud, flag-waving American – yet one who has worked almost exclusively in Canada for the last decade because that’s where you go when you want to be a hockey reporter. I fully recognize where my bread is buttered.

In theory, the CHL USA Prospect Challenge was a great idea, a chance to showcase some of the best draft-eligible prospects on either side of the 49th parallel. With the 20-20 view of hindsight, it couldn’t have been timed poorer on the heels of the changing junior and college hockey landscape.

This NCAA eligibility amendment has sparked again the age-old, who-does-it-better debate of Canada or the United States. Canada throttled the U.S. this week and thousands of junior-aged boys and their families just watched a lopsided referendum answer the question of the ‘better path.’ As if somehow that’s going to help the sport.

That debate isn’t just archaic. It’s killing hockey.

Competition is great, and in this age of participation trophies for all, please don’t mistake my plea below as a message to soften that. Full stop. Watching Canada and the U.S. duke it out is hockey nirvana, the game in its purest form – but that’s why the Olympics, 4 Nations Face-Off, World Juniors and World Championship exist.

This is an opportunity to rethink everything from the ground up.

We need to unify junior hockey

The USHL is bleeding; the NCAA eligibility change has taken a league that once stood on its own two feet and relegated it behind the Canadian Hockey League. The USHL’s one superpower, that you could play top-end junior hockey and still go onto Division I, has evaporated. Anyone associated with the CHL who thinks that is a good thing, or sees this as a power-grab opportunity, has lost the plot.

There’s no need now for Vancouver-born Macklin Celebrini or Mississauga-native Owen Power to come south to the USHL in order to go the college route.

The answer, this time, cannot be for Canada to puff its chest out and declare war on junior hockey in the U.S. There has already been talk of CHL expansion in the U.S., which will be outright rejected by USA Hockey as the national governing body with stern and swift response to defend its turf. And let’s be real, a number of Canadian markets have made overtures to join the USHL.

That can’t be the solution. Because the knife will cut both ways. How will the CHL feel if both Medicine Hat’s Gavin McKenna and Brampton’s Porter Martone exit their player contracts to enroll at the University of Michigan as rumored? Every side has something to lose in this brave new world.

There is only one answer. The USHL needs to join forces with the OHL, QMJHL and WHL to form one international junior league – as four equal spokes on the wheel – with the support and direction of the NHL. They could stand on equal footing with NHL draft rights and timelines, transact players freely between leagues, schedule regional cross-over games, compete for the Memorial Cup, and expand junior hockey’s reach in the United States.

Because that’s really what it needs to be about.

This moment in time is bigger than junior hockey; that is just the entree to a larger, more uncomfortable conversation. If the only answer is that Canada gobbles up the top American-born players in the CHL as a power grab, the United States hockey ecosystem is in big trouble.

Impact on college hockey

A few weeks in, we’re only now just starting to grapple with what these changes might mean for college hockey. Most of it has been viewed in a positive light publicly as more choice for players.

That isn’t necessarily the case. There may be a devastating impact on college hockey. One program, American International College, has already announced that it will drop from Division I to Division II – cutting the number of D1 programs back to 63. AIC cited the changing landscape, expected increased costs and scholarship requirements and found that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. It’s a big blow for a program that had been one of the great stories in the sport, qualifying for the NCAA tournament three times in the last five seasons. It’s entirely possible that the chasm between the big-money and small school programs widens to a point that it crushes the competitive balance of the sport. But we don’t know yet what’s around the corner.

Sources indicated to Daily Faceoff that there is a growing push among at least three members of Congress to further examine the NCAA’s rule change. We don’t yet know the impact of that. Currently, 62 percent of NCAA Division I men’s hockey players are American citizens. What if Congress pushes back against the NCAA and attempts to cap foreign scholarships in hockey? What if NIL money for foreign athletes is targeted with tax thresholds?

The game isn’t really growing

It’s impossible to work in hockey and not profess a deep respect and admiration for the heritage of the game and Canada’s role in it. But if we’re really being honest, the game has stagnated on both sides of the border – even in Canada, where hockey is king.

Canada invented hockey, but Canada alone can’t save hockey because the country appears to be tapped out.

According to Hockey Canada, player registrations for males ages five to 18 declined by 12 percent over the last 10 seasons. There are now more youth players in the United States than Canada, but the numbers still aren’t pretty. Over the same period of time, USA Hockey reported that male player registration for the same ages has increased by only 1.9 percent.

For perspective, between the two countries, there are 40,472 fewer boys ages 5-18 playing hockey than there were one decade ago. Let that sink in.

That isn’t limited to just Canada. While there’s been a slight uptick of approximately 8,600 new male players across the U.S., most of the new players are coming from the Southeast and Pacific districts. That masks that there are 15,000 fewer players signed up today to play in Massachusetts, Michigan, New England, New York and the Philadelphia regions compared to 10 years ago.

Most of these numbers have flown under the radar because of the explosive growth of girls’ hockey, which allows both federations to continue to report that numbers are up.

Declining Participation

Country	2014-15	2023-24	Change
Canada	408,316	359,256	-12%
United States	463,244	471,832	+1.9%

Sources: Hockey Canada, USA Hockey. Male player registration ages U6-U18.

All of that has occurred as the NHL has poured upwards of $200 million into an Industry Growth Fund since 2015 in an attempt to help grow the game, money that is distributed equally to all 32 NHL markets.

Whether it’s through the NHL’s impressive commitment in the IGF or the NHLPA’s wonderful Goals and Dreams Foundation, it feels like we need an approach other than handing out new equipment. Free gear and initial learn-to-play programs are fantastic. But we need more rinks and more touchpoints, more places to access the game. Hockey isn’t diverse not because it isn’t cool, it’s because there are so few places to play it in diverse areas. The barrier to entry – not just the cost, but the local access and availability of ice – is the one differentiator between hockey and basketball or baseball. For the most part, in the U.S., you can’t just go down to your local rec center for a pick-up game.

There are 2,230 indoor rinks in the U.S. servicing more than 471,000 male youth players – which is one rink for every 212 boys. There are 2,860 indoor rinks in Canada servicing 359,000-plus male youth players – which is one rink for every 125 boys. That doesn’t include girls’ players or adult players, which highlights the issue.

Lack of Rinks

Country	Rinks	Rink:Players	Players	Total Pop	% Pop Playing
Canada	2860	1:125	359,256	3,449,611	10.4%
United States	2230	1:212	471,832	25,260,855	1.9%

Sources: IIHF, U.S. Census, Statistics Canada. Players registered is males ages U6-U18; Total population is total number of males in each country aged 5-18.

Because of the scarcity of rinks, the expense in building and operating rinks, too many of these facilities have fallen into the wrong hands in big-business private equity – which has an inherently different objective since they’ve made youth sports for-profit.

Why are fewer kids playing? If you can afford it, and there happens to be a rink close by, the average youth hockey player is being squeezed out in a push to focus on “elite” players. Think about it from a business perspective. If you owned a rink with finite ice time, wouldn’t you focus on the 250 so-called ‘AAA’ players willing to pay $12,000 per year in tuition, instead of catering to 600 house league players who will pay $1,500 per year? There simply aren’t enough municipal or local rinks willing to bear the brunt of a non-profit approach.

Besides, our priorities are incredibly misguided when you consider that 99 percent of all of those players will advance only to play beer league anyway.

What’s next?

Change is on the horizon. Whenever the NHL decides the time is right, another window will open for the league to expand to 34 cities. Those new teams will inject much-needed additional revenue into the pot, in a league that struggles to generate meaningful organic new revenue year-over-year. With exploding franchise valuations, it’s entirely possible that the NHL could command as much as $2 billion per new team in the next expansion cycle.

Could you imagine if NHL owners pocketed half, spun off a new business arm with the other half and spent $2 billion to build and own 200 to 400 new rinks across the continent? It would be an expensive customer acquisition, but in the long run, perhaps it is not just a smart real estate and business play but maybe the only way to introduce a kid to hockey who might otherwise choose football or soccer.

If that sounds bold, everything should be on the table. The sobering numbers indicate hockey appears to be in a more perilous position than we’d all want to believe. Like it or not, Canada needs the United States to grow hockey and vice versa. We need to put down our flags and unite. It’s not Canada versus United States. It’s hockey versus all now, for once, for the good of the game.

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