Few in the sport have experienced the rapid evolution of American hockey as up close and personally as Mike Modano.
Growing up just outside Detroit, Modano was a minor hockey star. He spent his junior years in the WHL in Prince Albert, Sask., which was at that time the highest level available to American teenagers.
Picked first in the 1988 NHL Draft, Modano played four years with the Minnesota North Stars before relocation in 1993-94 led him to Dallas. There, he led the Stars to the first-ever Stanley Cup title for a team from the U.S. Sunbelt.
Modano saw how hockey quickly exploded in Texas from that 1999 championship on and how it spread into other non-traditional markets after the NHL expanded across the country throughout the decade.
Twenty-five years later, more American kids are playing hockey than ever. More Americans are playing in the NHL than ever, too.
It’s all built up to this: Team USA, with a captain in Auston Matthews from Scottsdale, Ariz., enters the 4 Nations Face-Off — the sport’s first best-on-best event in nine years — as the favorite.
Modano, 54, retired in 2011 as the NHL’s all-time leading scorer among U.S.-born players. He won gold at the 1996 World Cup and silver at the 2002 Olympics but admits it feels different watching this next generation of Team USA compete internationally.
The Americans are no longer the underdogs, as was often the case throughout his career.
He credits not only the rapid increase in talent from new sources but also the development work in the trenches by USA Hockey over the last two decades for getting them there.
Americans aren’t going to the Canadian junior leagues anymore to excel. They stay close to home and they’re better than ever.
“You just have so much to select from,” Modano said of the breadth of talent available to the Americans at the 4 Nations event, where the U.S. opens play against Finland on Thursday in Montreal. “Now there’s a little bit of pressure and expectation level, which is nice for the players to have.
“There’s a little stress going into it before these tournaments. It’s not ‘We hope to do OK, but we’re not up to Canada’s or Russia’s speed.’ Now (we’re) mentioned in the same breath as these top teams.”
When Modano won the Stanley Cup in Texas in 1999, the number of Americans in the NHL was actually on the decline. European players had begun to flood the league, to the point that Americans only played 17 percent of the NHL’s games that season.
Canada, long the sport’s dominant power, led the way at 54 percent.
By this season, however, the U.S. had nearly doubled its NHL participation to 30 percent, an all-time high. It has gained considerable ground on the Canadians the past 20 years.
The previously farfetched notion that the Americans could surpass Canada — both internationally and in representation in the world’s top league — has become a very real possibility.
Based on recent trends, it could happen in a little more than a decade.
“Throughout the lineup, man alive, they’ve got great puck-moving defensemen,” Modano said of Team USA’s 4 Nations roster. “They’ve got great goaltending. Up front, there’s some high-end skill.
“If anything, they’re just going to keep getting better. You have this changing of the guard, with Canada, that’s slowly kind of tilting the needle the other way a little bit.”
What follows is a breakdown of the four biggest reasons the U.S. may soon take over as the top hockey power in the world — if it hasn’t already.
GO DEEPER
Ranking the 4 Nations Face-Off rosters: America’s golden era is here
The NTDP model
By the middle of the 1990s, USA Hockey knew it had a problem — at least as it related to high-end talent with the men’s national team.
Sure, there were Hall of Famers at the top of the list; Modano, Brian Leetch, Brett Hull, Chris Chelios, Phil Housley and Jeremy Roenick were, to varying degrees, still in their primes. Beyond those guys and a few others, such as Keith Tkachuk and Tony Amonte, the player pool for international tournaments got shallow very quickly.
Example A: The 1994 World Championships in Italy, where the U.S. was smoked 8-0 by Finland in the semifinals, then lost to Sweden in the bronze-medal game. Craig Janney, a productive, play-making center who never made an NHL All-Star team, led that group in scoring with seven points. Behind him in scoring were Tim Sweeney, who played 291 NHL games over eight seasons, and Bill Lindsay, a solid bottom-sixer for the Florida Panthers.
Canada’s top scorers? Paul Kariya, Brendan Shanahan, Joe Sakic and Luc Robitaille, all Hall of Famers.
After another quarterfinal loss at the 1995 Worlds (to Canada), the U.S. was ready for a change.
“We weren’t winning internationally. We weren’t producing enough NHL players and elite level NHL players as we thought we could, based on the volume of players in our country,” USA Hockey executive director Pat Kelleher said. “So we did something different and something better.”
USA Hockey’s first step was hiring Jeff Jackson, a two-time NCAA championship-winning coach at Lake Superior State, and Bob Mancini, the head coach at Michigan Tech, and giving them carte blanche. Literally. The two sat down with a pad of paper, filling it with their ideas on what the best American players needed in order to develop into world-beaters, and how best to get it to them.
Thus, in 1996, the U.S. National Team Development Program was born. USA Hockey would build two teams — an under-18 team and an under-17 one — out of the best players in their birth years, house them in Ann Arbor, Mich., centralize their training and solve the country’s foremost hockey problem.
The plan was to create, as Kelleher called it, “a finishing school for those high-end kids.” Jackson was the head coach of the U18 team and senior director; Mancini led the U17 team and acted as director of player personnel. Both teams started playing games in the fall of 1997 against squads from the NCAA, USHL and NAHL, a Tier II junior hockey league.
Jackson and Mancini had the support of their big bosses, but not every important stakeholder was initially on board. The prospect of USA Hockey swooping in and picking off a region’s best players, as one would expect, did not go over well with the locals.
“(Concerns about taking players) got right down to the grassroots,” Mancini said. “I was physically accosted in a rink. I was chased out of rinks by coaches and people who couldn’t see the benefit of what USA Hockey was trying to do.”
There were, of course, less dramatic forces at play. In some cases, parents needed to be convinced that shipping their sons off to Michigan, away from their homes and relatively proven pathways to college and pro hockey, was the right move — and some couldn’t be swayed. In Year 1, Mancini said, about 70 percent of the players the USNTDP recruited wound up signing.
“We were losing really, really good players who were choosing other pathways,” Mancini said, “Those weren’t just legitimate concerns. They were legitimate reasons.”
At the start, there was no set schedule or completed facilities. Players who did join would need to be placed with billet families and enroll in high-school classes. Mancini compared the job to “building the plane and flying it at the same time.”
By Year 2, though, the number was closer to 80 percent. By Year 3, it was close to 90. “All of a sudden,” Mancini said, “you were fielding calls from parents and agents saying, ‘Hey, you need to watch my kid. You need to come here.'”
By 2000, the program had produced a No. 1 NHL pick, goalie Rick DiPietro. Since, it has produced four more: Erik Johnson in 2006, Patrick Kane in 2007, Matthews in 2016 and Jack Hughes in 2019. In all, 99 NTDP alums have gone on to become first-round picks. That’s elite talent.
In 2004, with a roster built primarily from NTDP players, the U.S. won its first-ever gold medal at the World Junior Championships. It has won six more, including in 2024 and 2025, and the program’s presence on the roster has only grown. That’s high-end international success.
“It used to be we (hoped) to compete for a gold medal in events. Now the expectations are there,” Kelleher said. “That’s a great thing.”
And now, at the first international best-on-best competition featuring NHL players since 2016, the U.S. roster will feature 15 NTDP alums, including the captain (Matthews), alternate captains (Matthew Tkachuk and Charlie McAvoy) and starting goaltender (Connor Hellebuyck).
“It was everything I needed,” said Matt Boldy, a winger for the Minnesota Wild, member of the 4 Nations team and part of the program from 2017-19. “Skates, skill work, everything. Strength, conditioning, the whole thing. So going there at 16, it meant everything.”
Rapid growth from outside traditional hubs
You don’t need to look much further than the 4 Nations roster for proof the Americans can now draw from throughout the country better than in the past.
While Team USA’s best-on-best clubs have traditionally been made up exclusively of players from the Three M states — Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts — this year’s team features players born all over the country: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Missouri, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
That’s the result of a demographic shift that includes 100,000 more players in the U.S. in the years between 2000 and 2015, including more than 50 percent growth in states as widespread as California, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.
In many states, having an NHL team has been a key factor — especially with teams in those regions winning the Stanley Cup in nine of the last 20 seasons (2004, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2024).
“The NHL clubs and the NHL itself, their support and their focus and the way they dig in with their communities has been a tremendous benefit for us,” Kelleher said.
“Collectively, there’s just been more access to the game for these kids,” Modano added. “You have a deeper talent pool as the years have gone on, more kids have progressed in the game, and now you’re seeing a lot of high-end skill and major players in the NHL and junior and college. It’s amazing to see now that those numbers have gone up dramatically.”
In the last three years alone, Mancini said, USA Hockey has added 36 spots at national player development camps, bringing the total to 216, “because we looked around and we realized, ‘My gosh, we’re leaving players in their districts (who need this opportunity).’”
That next wave of talent is only just beginning to make inroads into the highest levels, too. Some of the NHL’s newest rising stars are coming from these next-gen U.S. markets, such as Flames rookie of the year candidate Dustin Wolf (from California), Maple Leafs power forward Matthew Knies (Arizona), and Senators defenseman Jake Sanderson (Montana).
USA Hockey’s other development paths
In 2009, with the NTDP cooking as a pipeline for turning elite 16-year-olds into elite NHL players, USA Hockey launched what it called “the American Development Model (ADM),” a framework for helping players reach their full potential, whatever it might be, starting with “learn to skate” programs for children under 6.
It boils down to age-appropriate training for players and ongoing, research-based education for USA Hockey’s 60,000 registered coaches. Some of the principles, Kelleher said, were developed at the NTDP.
“We said, ‘Hey, now let’s have a better system of development across the country that everyone can point to as the best way to do this,'” Kelleher said. “And at the same time, let’s make sure we bring more kids into the system that can be exposed to our game, to have an opportunity to be developed — (whether as) a rec league player, a high school player, a Division-I college player or Olympic or Paralympic athletes.”
The goal isn’t specifically to build out a group of rank-and-file American NHL players — but that is something of a byproduct. What has been created, to use a favored USA Hockey term, are “multiple player pathways.”
Making the NTDP might be the straightest line to the NHL. It’s certainly not the only one.
On any given day this NHL season, Mancini said, there are close to 300 American players in the NHL. Of those, about 100 came through the NTDP. Two hundred, in other words, did not — they played for NCAA teams, or in the USHL, or at prep schools or at Minnesota high schools.
“The depth of our player pool at the elite level,” Kelleher said, “is due to the fact that we have a number of different options and number of different places for players to go to be developed.”
The 4 Nations roster is a testament to that; of the 23 players on the initial roster, eight took an alternate route, including Jets winger Kyle Connor. He was cut from the U17 team and played three seasons in the USHL. As an 18-year-old, after leading that league in scoring, he committed to the University of Michigan, where he spent one season before Winnipeg drafted him 15th. He was with the Jets by the time he was 19.
Eight years later, he leads the league in goals among American players.
“Kyle Connor didn’t necessarily come through the front door,” Kelleher said, “and now he’s a superstar in the NHL.”
The impact of the ADM as it relates to the national teams is clear during tryouts, said Mancini, now USA Hockey’s assistant executive director of hockey development. In the earliest days of the NTDP, he said, there might have only been 20 players good enough for him, Jackson, and the rest of the staff to target.
“Now you go to the NTDP tryout camp, they’re bringing 40 players,” Mancini said, “and after the first few, where we all say, ‘These kids (are locks),’ it’s hard to choose because that’s how many good players we have.
“We’re not just producing more players. We’re producing better players.”
A new goalie factory
The other main improvement that has helped make the Americans favorites entering the 4 Nations is the talent they have in net.
With Russia not taking part in international events and the Canadians continuing to struggle to develop stars in the crease, the U.S. has a clear advantage on paper when it comes to stopping pucks.
It’s a group led by Hellebuyck, a Hart Trophy candidate with the Jets and the consensus best goaltender in the world right now. The Americans also have top netminders Jake Oettinger of the Stars and Jeremy Swayman of the Bruins on the roster.
Those three rank first, second and 13th in NHL wins, respectively, over the past four seasons.
The U.S. also left a deep bench at home, with a group of goaltenders that would have been in the running for roles on any other country’s roster: Wolf, Thatcher Demko, Joey Daccord, Joseph Woll, Anthony Stolarz, John Gibson, Jonathan Quick and Spencer Knight.
The U.S. has historically produced some quality netminders — led by Ryan Miller, Mike Richter, Tom Barrasso, Tim Thomas and John Vanbiesbrouck — but never with this level of depth in a single generation.
The Americans have experienced a sharp rise at the position the past five years, in particular, an improvement at least partly due to the NTDP and an increased focus on goalie development at younger ages.
Like some European nations, USA Hockey has made increasing the number of goalie coaches in minor hockey a central focus. It also has set an internal goal to have more than 10 percent of all players be goaltenders by 2030 and getting more kids trying the position instead of specializing young.
Their most ambitious goal is for American goalies to play 50 percent of the minutes in the NHL in the not-so-distant future. (They’re at 23 percent this season.)
According to USA Hockey’s director of goalie development Steve Thompson, having an improved minor hockey and junior system that feeds into the NCAA has worked wonders, giving their goalies additional time in the crease before turning pro.
All three of the U.S.’s goalies at the 4 Nations came through the U.S. junior system before playing two or three years in college. Canada’s three goalies, in contrast, all went directly from junior to pro at a younger age.
“Just having that extra three years that the college game has provided has given some of our goalies a little bit longer to work on their game,” Thompson said. “And then when they do get to pro hockey, they’re a little bit more mature, they’re a little bit stronger, they’ve been through the ringer a little bit longer to be maybe a little bit mentally stronger. I think that’s been a real big success story for our American goaltenders.”
And it’s given them a sizable advantage on hockey’s biggest stage with the 4 Nations here and the next Winter Olympics only 12 months away.
“It’ll be fun to watch,” Modano said.
(Photo: Vitor Munhoz / 4NFO / World Cup of Hockey via Getty Images)
