Is Canada losing its dominance in hockey?

It was a very good year for hockey in the U.S.  Their Junior team took gold and the Junior World Championships and at the Olympics it took an overtime goal by Sidney Crosby to wrestle the gold away from the Americans.  Then this past weekend 59 Americans were selected in the NHL Entry Draft. 

What is happening here?  Are the Americans closing the gap on us?  The answer may very well be yes. Afterall the United States is 10 times the size of Canada in terms of population and hockey is slowly catching on with American kids. The draft numbers indicate that at the very least, at the elite level Americans are catching up to us.

But part of the story is that the NHL is turning into primarily a North American league and Europeans are staying at home. Only the elite Europeans seem to be making it to the NHL and the bottom half of NHL rosters are made up of Canadians and Americans.  In the chart below it shows that 75% of draft selections were North Americans. Go back to the 2001 draft and you would find that the picks were split 50:50 between North America and Europe.  The proportion of Canadians selected has grown by 11% but the proportion of Americans selected has grown by 14%. In 2001 there were 38 Russians selected and that has shrunken to just 8.  Finland has gone from 23 to 7.  The Czechs have gone from 31 to 5.  Slovakia from 15 to just 2.

It's not just Brian Burke who is building around North Americans, so are the other GMs.  The European-dominated Detroit Red Wings are no longer the model that is being followed.  Chicago and Philadelphia both have rosters loaded with Canadians and Americans.

Country	Picks	Percent
Canada	99	47.1%
United States	59	28.1%
Sweden	20	9.5%
Russia	8	3.8%
Finland	7	3.3%
Czech Republic	5	2.4%
Germany	5	2.4%
Slovakia	2	1.0%
Switzerland	2	1.0%
Denmark	1	0.5%
Latvia	1	0.5%
Norway	1	0.5%