Saskatchewan still punches well above its weight in NHL player production. But it has faded in recent years as a seedbed of elite talent.

Throughout much of NHL history, Saskatchewan has been a powerhouse for producing players for the world’s best hockey league.

But numbers drawn from the NHL.com's historical database show a recent trendline that should cause some concern in the province. In short, there were 57 Saskatchewan-born players in the league in 2010, and there are 20 today.

That sharp decline over a relatively short period of time should be seen in the light of another statistic that continues to bode well for the prairie province, a population of 1.2 million people. Among North America's top 15 NHLer-producing provinces and states, lightly populated Saskatchewan still has the league's highest per capita of native-born players. When taking the per capita and multiplying by 100,000, it comes to 1.67 NHLers per 100,000 residents — a No. 1 position it’s held unchallenged for decades.

Just 13 years ago, however, that league-leading figure was an astonishing 5.4 NHLers per 100,000 residents, blowing away every other province and state by a country mile.

While the governing body of ice hockey in Saskatchewan isn't as focused on developing players for The Show as it is on ensuring positive experiences for everyone involved, the trend is worth a closer look.

Saskatchewan has a well-deserved reputation for being a fertile breeding ground for NHL players.

It’s not just because of that legendary lad from Floral, Sask. — Mr. Hockey himself, Gordie Howe — who rewrote the record book during an unmatchable NHL (and WHA) career that stretched from the 1940s to the 1980s.

During some seasons in the 1940s and ’50s, there were more NHLers on Original Six rosters from little Saskatchewan than from the far more populous Quebec, though Ontario-born players have always dominated the NHL ranks and continue to do so to this day.

Still, Saskatchewan has consistently punched far above its weight — from the Second World War to the current season — when it comes to churning out NHL-caliber skaters.

Among the Saskatchewan-born superstars who’ve graced the game’s premier league is dynasty-era New York Islanders’ titan Bryan Trottier (Hockey Hall of Fame, six-time Stanley Cup winner as a player with the Isles and Pittsburgh Penguins, winner of the Calder, Hart, Art Ross, Conn Smythe and King Clancy trophies). Other standouts include Patrick Marleau, Wendel Clark, Ryan Getzlaf, Bernie Federko, Theo Fleury and Brian Propp, along with goaltending greats Glenn Hall, Cam Ward, Braden Holtby and Johnny Bower.

Saskatchewanians such as Seattle’s Jordan Eberle, St. Louis’ Brayden Schenn and Tampa Bay’s Brandon Hagel are high-level performers in today’s NHL.

However, there is cause for concern in the trapezoidal province.

When Did the Downward Trend Begin?

In 1980, the year Trottier led the Islanders to their first of four straight Stanley Cups and earned playoff MVP honors to boot, there were 55 Saskatchewan-born players out of 654 total in the NHL — 8.4 percent of everyone who dressed at least once that year for an NHL club. A remarkable six of those Saskatchewan products played for the Islanders that season — Trottier, Clark Gillies, goalie Glenn 'Chico' Resch, Dave Lewis, Bob Bourne and Lorne Henning.

In 1990, the year Eberle was born in Regina, Sask., there were 52 players from the province in a significantly larger 725-player NHL (7.2 percent of the total). And by 2009-10, the years when Eberle became known across Canada for his World Junior Championship heroics in back-to-back tournaments, Saskatchewan hit its high-water mark with those 57 NHLers — including Marleau and Getzlaf, along with Jarret Stoll, Scott Hartnell and Brenden Morrow.

Eberle debuted the following season with one of the most memorable first NHL goals in league history, a short-handed, full-speed, toe-drag bamboozler and back-hand flip shot over Calgary’s sprawling Miikka Kiprusoff before crashing into the boards.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZYaIjvEqIA[/embed]

But since then, the drop-off in the number of Saskatchewan players has been fairly steady: down to 43 in 2015-16, 36 in 2016-17 and 27 last season.

That’s the lowest number since the pre-expansion 1960s — back in Howe’s heyday — or about 2.6 percent of the 1,058 players who had donned NHL uniforms between October 2022 and June 2023.

So far this season, just 20 sons of Saskatchewan have played at least one game in the league since the first puck dropped in early October — a number likely to grow by the end of the regular season but unlikely to reach even last year’s low-water mark for the past half-century.

And one other thing: when the 30-man training camp roster was announced last week for the eventual 25-player Team Canada squad for this year’s World Junior Championship in Sweden, there was only one Saskatchewan-born player selected: 18-year-old center Brayden Yager of the WHL’s Moose Jaw Warriors, a No. 14 overall pick for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 2023 NHL draft.

Yager’s widely seen as a shoo-in to make the team heading to Gothenburg for the high-profile Dec. 26 to Jan. 5 tournament, but he’ll be the lone Saskatchewanian gunning for gold.

Hockey Saskatchewan Focused on Positive Experiences and Accessibility

The situation does not appear to be ringing alarm bells at Hockey Saskatchewan, the provincial oversight body that works with Hockey Canada to promote elite player development and to generally ensure a high-quality sporting experience for anyone who plays the game at any level in the province.

“Hockey Saskatchewan doesn’t track which players do or do not advance to the NHL,” Kelly McClintock, the organization’s GM, told The Hockey News via email. “The province and the community they are from are simply incredibly proud of those who do progress to that level.”

McClintock added that “we continually evaluate and upgrade our coaching and player development programs, including in the area of officiating, but the primary goal is to ensure every kid who starts playing hockey that they have a positive experience and play till the end of their minor hockey career as a 17-year-old.”

The head of Hockey Saskatchewan also noted that it conducts a bi-annual review of its male and female elite/advanced programs from U-13 and up “to ensure we have the right amount of opportunities that are accessible for players throughout the province. 

“For example, at the U-18 AAA male and female programs in (Saskatchewan), teams are able to recruit players from the entire province, which enables access to that level of programming to every player in that age group. It forces teams to provide great programs, and they must have billet co-ordinators, educational co-ordinators, mental health resources, skill instructors, etc. These teams are active seven days a week, and the two leagues are two of the most competitive in the country.”

It isn’t just Saskatchewan facing challenges in raising NHL-caliber players, either. The growing proportion of American players in the NHL has been gradually diminishing the percentage of all Canadian-born talent in the world’s top hockey league for years.

About 30 percent of all NHL players this year are from the U.S. — Canadian-born players account for about 42 percent, and about 28 percent are from Europe (mostly Sweden, Finland, Russia and Czechia).

But when this century began during the 1999-2000 season, the proportion of American players in the NHL was about 17 percent, and the NHL’s Canadian content was above 54 percent.

U.S. states have had a lot of catching up to do to rival the winter sports culture and elite development programs in hockey-mad Canadian provinces. Still, Minnesota — the top NHLer-producing U.S. state — is poised to eclipse both Quebec and Alberta this season for the No. 2 spot behind Ontario as a hotbed of NHL talent. That would be a first for any U.S. state.

The impressive production of NHL players in Saskatchewan over the generations is part of the province’s identity. Quebec, similarly, has built a reputation for producing NHL stars — and two years ago, statistics showing a decline in hockey’s popularity in the province and a drop in the proportion of Quebec-born players in the NHL prompted Quebec Premier François Legault to appoint a special commission to halt those trends.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe might want to compare notes with his counterpart in Quebec.

Minnesota (population 5.7 million) ranks highly when calculating the number of NHL players the state produces per capita — about 0.84 NHLers per 100,000 people. That’s considerably higher than Quebec (0.52/100,000) and comparable to Alberta (0.98/100,000) and British Columbia (0.76/100,000).

Minnesota overtook Saskatchewan in 2014 as a producer of NHL players and has been widening the gap ever since. When Team USA announced the training camp roster for the upcoming World Juniors, seven of the 29 players named were from Minnesota.

Saskatchewan’s neighbor on the Prairies, Manitoba (1.4 million people), is the home turf of many NHL greats, including Flin Flon’s Bobby Clarke and Winnipeggers Mark Stone and Jonathan Toews. Manitoba has the second-highest rate of player production behind Saskatchewan: 1.36/100,000 for 19 NHLers so far this season.

Even though Ontario’s population is huge at 15.3 million, its 152 current NHL players equate to almost one per 100,000 people — an impressive 0.99/100,000. It’s no surprise that exceptional talents such as Wayne Gretzky, Connor McDavid and Mitch Marner come from Ontario.

Where Per-Capita Statistics Can Be Skewed

Per-capita statistics aren’t always illuminating, especially when looking at some numbers below the top 15. Who knew that, statistically speaking, youngsters from Yukon have the greatest likelihood of making the NHL, with 2.27 players in the league for every 100,000 people?

But that’s actually a pretty meaningless number, skewed because Yukon has a total population of just 44,000, and the territory happens to have produced a single current NHL player: Whitehorse-born Dylan Cozens of the Buffalo Sabres.

Likewise, the NHL’s three Prince Edward Island-born players — New York Islanders’ Noah Dobson, Anaheim’s Ross Johnston and Ottawa’s Zack MacEwen— translate into a sky-high 1.73/100,000 NHLer-production rate thanks to P.E.I.’s tiny population of 173,000.

For now, though, Saskatchewan remains North America’s most impressive per-capita producer of NHL players, even if the raw number of NHLers from the province is experiencing a significant slide in this era of intensifying competition with the U.S., Europe and other parts of Canada to secure spots in the planet’s best hockey league.

Randy Boswell is a Carleton University journalism professor and Ottawa-based writer who plays beer-league hockey five times a week.