We're one month into the NHL season, and there's no Canadian in the top 10 points list. As much as it's early, it would be unprecedented if this continues, writes Randy Boswell.

It’s a sure sign of hockey’s ever-growing popularity beyond its historical roots in Canada — and the stuttering start to this season by Edmonton Oilers megastar Connor McDavid — but there’s currently not a single Canadian player in the NHL’s top 10 scoring race.

It’s a rare situation, perhaps even unprecedented, but with Canadians now comprising just over 40 percent of the 800-plus skaters (forwards and defensemen) who play every year in the 32-team NHL, the competition from exceptionally talented American, Swedish, Russian, Finnish and other European sharpshooters and playmakers is getting tougher every year.

After at least 10 games for all teams so far in this 82-game 2023-24 NHL season, the top 10 scorers in the league include five Americans, two Swedes, two Russians and one Czech. Yes, there are three Canucks in the mix — but, alas, not the kind of Canucks who carry a Canadian passport.

On the list are Florida-born brothers Jack Hughes (tied for first with 20 points) and Quinn Hughes (tied for sixth with 16 points). Fellow U.S.-born players Dylan Larkin (17 points), J.T. Miller (16 points) and Auston Matthews (15 points) round out the Americans currently in the top 10.

Swedish players Elias Pettersson (20 points) and Jesper Bratt (18 points), Russians Artemi Panarin (18 points) and Nikita Kucherov (16 points), and Czechia’s David Pastrnak (16 points) are the others atop the scoring race before Monday’s slate of games.

The top Canadian at the moment with 14 points is 13th-place scorer Brayden Point, the Calgary-born center who was the NHL’s top playoff goal-scorer both times he and his Tampa Bay Lightning teammates won the Stanley Cup in 2020 and 2021.

(There’s another Calgary-born player currently in the No. 11 spot in the NHL scoring race with 15 points, but Toronto Maple Leafs right-winger William Nylander is a dual Canadian-Swedish citizen who plays international hockey for Sweden, where his father — ex-NHLer and former Calgary Flames player Michael Nylander — was born.)

The early-season ranking is certainly skewed by Richmond Hill, Ont.-born McDavid’s unexpectedly bumpy start to the 2023-24 campaign. He’s currently sitting at No. 57 in the NHL scoring race with just 10 points.

Widely considered the best player in the world, McDavid has missed two games this season with an injury and hasn’t yet hit the lightning-fast stride that has put him continuously at or near the top of the NHL scoring race since the 2016-17 season, earning him five Art Ross trophies along the way as the league’s No. 1 point-getter (including the past three).

After just one month of the 2023-24 season, is it too early to sound the alarm on the relatively low-scoring production among elite-level Canadian NHLers? 

Of course, it is. McDavid — who has scored five or more points in a single game eight times in his career — could reel off three big performances in a row and catapult to No. 1 in a week. So could several other Canadian players within hailing distance of the league leaders.

But the numbers aren’t lining up well so far. The only other Canadian apart from Tampa Bay’s Point currently in the top 20 NHL scorers is the Anaheim Ducks’ Mason McTavish (T-17th, 13 points). And there are just four other Canadian players in the top 30: the Leafs' Mitch Marner (T-17, 13 points) and John Tavares (T-23, 12 points), Flyers forward Travis Konecny (T-23, 12 points) and Mark Stone (T-23, 12 points).

At the end of last season, three of the top 10 scorers in the NHL were Canadian. McDavid ran away with the league scoring title and thus the Art Ross Trophy with 153 points, well ahead of the second-place finisher, McDavid’s Germany-born Oilers teammate Leon Draisaitl, who had 128. Nova Scotia’s Nathan MacKinnon (No. 5, 111 points) and B.C.-born Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (No. 9, 104 points) also finished in the top 10 in 2022-23, along with two Americans, a Russian, a Czech, a Finn and a Swede.

According to NHL.com, 695 skaters (just counting forwards and defensemen) have played so far this season, including 292 Canadians (42 percent), 210 Americans (30.2 percent), 67 Swedes (9.6 percent), 38 Russians (5.5 percent), 31 Finns (4.5 percent), 20 Czechs (2.9 percent), nine Swiss (1.3 percent) and seven Germans (1.0 percent). The remaining three percent of skaters (21 players) hail from Slovakia, Denmark, Belarus, France, Latvia, Netherlands, Slovenia and Norway.

In 2022-23, out of 951 skaters who had dressed for an NHL team by the end of the regular season, 406 were Canadians (42.7 percent). The last time Canadians made up a majority of skaters on NHL rosters was in the 2015-16 season when they constituted 50.3 percent of the total. Since then, it’s been a fairly gradual but steady decline to the current 42 percent after the first month of this season.

Goaltenders aren’t counted among the skaters. Out of this NHL season’s top 10 goalies so far (ranked by goals-against average), four are Canadian, four are American, one is Russian, and one is Swedish.

But as a further sign of the internationalization of Canada’s national winter sport, not a single one of the top 10-ranked goalies at the end of last season was from this country.

It has never happened in the NHL’s 106-year history that the final top 10 scoring list failed to include a Canadian. That’s not too surprising, given the fact that until the 1970s, nearly every player in the NHL was Canadian. Then came an era of increasing openness to clubs signing players from other countries, eventually tilting the balance of nationalities in the NHL in favor of non-Canadians.

But even since the start of the 21st century, there have never been fewer than two Canadian players among the league’s top 10 point-getters at the end of each season — and typically, there have been five or more.

The 2000-01 season was an anomaly with just two Canadians in the top 10: Joe Sakic (No. 2, Colorado, 118 points) and Jason Allison (No. 5, Boston Bruins, 95 points). But other seasons saw as many as eight Canadians finish in the top 10.

In 2006-07, for example, Nova Scotia’s Sidney Crosby (No. 1, Pittsburgh Penguins, 120 points) won the league scoring title while seven other Canadians finished in the top 10: Joe Thornton, Vincent Lecavalier, Dany Heatley, Martin St-Louis, Joe Sakic, Marc Savard and Daniel Briere.

Could some Canadians enter the top 10 in the next couple of days? Sure, but this is a trend to keep following as the season progresses and amid the discussion of a World Cup of Hockey in 2025.

Randy Boswell is a longtime journalist in Ottawa and a journalism professor at Carleton University.