North Star Rising: Minnesota Rivals Quebec, Alberta for Second-Most NHL Skaters Behind Ontario

When it comes to province- and state-level skater representation in the NHL, Minnesota now rivals Quebec and Alberta as No. 2 behind Ontario. Minnesota's risen through the ranks in the 21st century.

A THN regional analysis of NHL players’ birthplaces highlights Minnesota’s clear emergence as a hotbed of world-class hockey talent. 

The U.S.-Canada border state now routinely generates more NHLers than British Columbia, Saskatchewan or Manitoba — and even edges in front of Alberta and Quebec this season in the long-running competition to be the second-most productive breeding ground for NHL players after the perennially league-leading Ontario, according to NHL.com data.

At this early stage of the 2023-24 season, more players from Minnesota have played a game in the NHL than from either Quebec or Alberta. If that trend continues all season, the 'North Star' state would — for the first time by any U.S. jurisdiction — take the No. 2 spot among North American provinces and states for NHL player production.

That position has been held by either Quebec or Alberta nearly every year since the NHL was formed in 1917 — the only exceptions being a few seasons in the 1940s and ’50s when Saskatchewan or Manitoba produced a few more NHLers than Quebec.

Vancouver Canucks winger Brock Boeser, a Burnsville, Minn. native, serves as the poster boy for his home state’s increasingly important role in the feeder system for NHL talent this season, currently leading the NHL with 17 goals. But Minnesota’s rise as a hockey player hothouse didn’t happen suddenly. It’s been a steady climb since NHL hockey returned to Minneapolis-St. Paul with the Wild in the 2000-01 season.

Minnesota had already surpassed its northern neighbor, Manitoba, as a producer of NHL players in the late 1980s, back before the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas in 1993. But following the Wild’s arrival in Minnesota, the state’s success at churning out NHLers overtook Massachusetts for good in 2004, Saskatchewan in 2014 and British Columbia in 2018.

Then, last season, 55 Minnesota-born players donned NHL uniforms compared with just 49 Alberta players, per NHL.com data. The U.S. state had never had more NHLers on the ice than Alberta, which has been in a see-saw battle with Quebec in recent years for the league’s No. 2 ranking.

And so far this season, as of Dec. 4, Minnesota (44 players, 5.8 percent) outpaces both Alberta (39, 5.2 percent) and Quebec (42, 5.6 percent). That’s still far behind the number of Ontarians in NHL lineups (147, 19.4 percent) but on track to make hockey history.

This sub-national breakdown of players’ places of origin, drawn from current and historical data available at the NHL.com website, shows that Ontario has consistently and decisively been the top North American province or state for producing NHLers going back to the Original Six Era that ended with a landmark league expansion to 12 teams in the 1967-68 season. That expansion season saw the annual number of players who laced up for at least one NHL game jump from about 150 per year to nearly 300.

More than a half-century later in today’s 32-team NHL — with more than 900 forwards and defensemen typically taking to the ice each season — Ontario remains by far the leading producer of players in the league, currently almost 20 percent of all skaters.

But the rise of Minnesota as particularly fertile territory for top-caliber hockey players is perhaps the most significant trend in more recent birthplace stats from Canadian provinces and U.S. states and a key contributor to the ever-growing proportion of American skaters in the world’s best league.

The data for this report was collected on Dec. 3 and 4, when 756 NHL skaters — that’s all forwards and defensemen — were listed as having played at least one NHL game so far in the 2023-24 season. Based on previous end-of-season totals, that number will gradually grow to about 900 by playoff time as teams add standout minor leaguers to their rosters or injured veterans finally get back into action after missing the first part of the season.

Between Nov. 17 and Dec. 3, for example, the list had expanded from 729 to 756 after 27 new players had laced up for at least one game over that span of time.

As of Dec. 4, about 42.6 percent of all NHL skaters on the 32 rosters are from Canada (322 players), with close to half of those Canadians (45.7 percent) coming from Ontario alone. Slightly under 30 percent of all NHLers (29.6 percent; 224 players) are currently from the United States, and 27.7 percent (210 players) are European.

These numbers don’t include goaltenders, who are listed in a separate database at NHL.com. This is especially worth noting because a quick check of the birthplaces of netminders — who typically number fewer than 100 per NHL season — show trendlines noticeably different than those for the geographic origins of NHL centers, wingers and blueliners. Of the 76 goalies who’ve played in at least one game so far this season, just 23 of them (30.3 percent) are Canadian-born, 19 are Americans (25 percent), and 34 come from Europe (44.7 percent).

NHL goalie origins are clearly worth a closer look, particularly given the high proportion of European netminders. But for now, back to where the league’s skaters have come from.

Before the start of the 21st century, Canadians had always constituted a substantial majority of all NHL players. In the early 1970s — before the significant influx of American and European players began — more than 90 percent of all NHLers were from Canada, according to NHL.com historical data. About half of that Canadian total, and sometimes more than half, has always come from Ontario — a trend that can be observed from the very beginnings of the NHL in 1917 when there were just 39 players in the league. Thirty-four of them were Canadians (87 percent), and 26 of the 34 Canadians were from Ontario (76 percent).

In that inaugural NHL season, there were eight Quebec-born skaters as Ontario and Quebec established a 1-2 ranking for player origins that would be repeated in nearly every NHL season until early in this century, except for the handful of seasons in the Original Six Era when Saskatchewan or Manitoba produced a few more NHLers than Quebec.

In the early 2000s, Alberta began challenging Quebec and then overtook it for the runner-up spot behind Ontario. Since then, either Alberta or Quebec have maintained the No. 2 spot for NHL player production, with Alberta consistently outperforming Quebec between 2003 and 2017 before the lead began flipping back and forth between the two in recent seasons (with Ontario still well out in front as the No. 1 supplier of NHLers among provinces and states).

Over the course of the 2022-23 season, 179 Ontarians, 61 Quebec-born players, 55 Minnesotans and 49 Albertans were recorded as having played in the NHL.

Players from Quebec had always outnumbered Minnesota-born players until 2021-22 when an equal number of players — 55 Minnesotans and 55 Quebeckers — played games over the course of that season. That year, 57 Alberta-born players and 196 Ontarians played in at least one NHL game.

Minnesota, Quebec and Alberta now appear to be locked in a three-way battle for second place behind Ontario in the ongoing geographic rivalry to produce NHL-caliber players. British Columbia, with 37 native sons on NHL rosters so far this season, isn’t far behind.

The proportion of Quebec-born players in the NHL is not just an interesting statistic in La Belle Province. In November 2021, Quebec Premier Francois Legault announced the creation of a committee to study declining interest in hockey in the province and to boost the number of Quebec-born players in the NHL.

The premier’s announcement came six months after a shocking moment for Quebec: in May 2021, the Montreal Canadiens played their first-ever game in the club’s glory-filled, 111-year history to that date without a single Quebec-born player in the lineup.

“Hockey is more than a sport in Quebec,” Legault said in launching his commission that year, referring to Habs legends such as Maurice 'Rocket' Richard and Guy Lafleur as icons of Quebec’s core French-Canadian identity.

The biggest trend in recent decades in the broad nationality numbers is the steadily increasing proportion of American NHL players and the gradual, relative decline in the amount of Canadian-born talent in the league — especially in the years since the 2011-12 season, a stretch of just over a decade that has seen a persistent decrease in the proportion of Canadians in the league from 54.3 percent to less than 43 percent today.

Since the start of the 21st century, the proportion of American players in the NHL has nearly doubled from 16.5 percent to today’s 30 percent, while the proportion of Europeans dipped from 28 percent in 2000 to 23 percent in 2010 before bouncing back up to 28 percent today.

The impact of the ongoing shift in players’ origins was recently in evidence when — after the first month of the current NHL season — the league’s top 10 scoring race featured no Canadian players, a situation that appears to have been unprecedented in the NHL’s 106-year history if the season finished that way. 

Five Americans, two Swedes, two Russians and one Czech stood as the league’s top point-getters at the time, though four Canadians — Colorado’s Cale Makar (Alberta) and Nathan MacKinnon (Nova Scotia) and Tampa Bay’s Brayden Point (Alberta) — appear on the list as of Dec. 3. Edmonton’s Connor McDavid (Ontario) will likely soon enter that list as well after a slow start.

With the 2024 World Junior Championship approaching, seven players from Minnesota are on Team USA's preliminary roster, the most of any state. It looks like the 'State of Hockey' isn't slowing down anytime soon.