On Frozen Blog

In the middle of this past hockey season consensus was that the 2007 NHL Entry Draft would offer up another strong showing by American prospects — seven or eight of them were likely to be tabbed in the first round. This would follow by a year an Entry Draft in which fully 10 Americans went in round one. These kind of tallies are bettered only by the Canadians.

As we near the 11th hour of the Columbus draft that forecast is being widely revised . . . upward. TSN’s superb draft primer forecasts 10 Yanks as first-rounders; The Hockey News’ Hot 100 list, a ranking compendium comprising the blended prognostications of 10 NHL scouts, also has 10 Americans going in round one. There are a litany of highly thoughtful and well-respected reader-generated draft forecasts to be found at Hockeysfuture this week, and again Americans litter those lists.

No two Americans have ever gone 1-2 in round one. It almost happened last year. It well could tomorrow night in Columbus.

If 10 Americans again have their names called on Versus tomorrow night the implications are beyond clear: in consecutive years the broad pipeline of American development — from the USNTDP to U.S. college hockey to the USHL to American high school hockey — will have claimed fully one-third of the NHL draft’s first round. And by the way, one of the Americans likely to go in round one tomorrow night is a Californian.

As player development goes, this is called trending upward.

But what might perhaps be even more impressive than the sheer tally of American talent is its breadth across positions. Looking over the haul of first-round U.S. talent in recent drafts, and with an eye toward this year’s, one notices sleek snipers (Kane, Kessel, Oshie), bruising blueliners (the Johnsons, Joe Finley, Nick Petrecki, Colby Cohen), power forwards aplenty (Okposo, Bobby Ryan, Skille, van Riemsdyk, Pacioretty), and especially an abundance of two-way rearguards.

Interestingly, if there’s one area of positional weakness relative to the Canadians and Europeans in recent drafts for the Americans, it’s an area of previous strength: in goal. Since Rick DiPietro went first overall in 2000, we really haven’t seen USAHockey or anyone else produce high-end talent between the American pipes. That 2000 draft is the more intriguing in light of the modest American skating talent that followed DiPietro in the first round: Ron Hainsey, Brooks Orpik, David Hale, and Jeff Taffe.

This decade, it seems, the U.S. feasts in first-round skating talent and famines in net, and vice versa.

While the best is yet to come for U.S. national teams in international competition because of this embarassment of young talent riches, over at the World Championships this spring it was abundantly evident to us that the new generation of warp-speed, wicked skill set is already primed to make an impact. That U.S. squad coached by Mike Sullivan was one overtime, struck goalpost away from taking down gold-medal finalist Finland. And it was a conspicuously young squad.