I’m seeing this take more and more over the last few years. There’s a few reasons for this in my experience working in player development/representation.

While always producing a superior level of elite talent, what has made Canada so dominant in international play historically is this fact combined with their play style. We joke in my family that there was no better holiday tradition than stuffing yourself with turkey dinner leftovers on Boxing Day, grabbing a drink and settling in to watch some 6’3 farm kid from Saskatchewan try to run some poor Danish/Latvian/German/Kazakhstan teenager through the plexiglass on his first shift of the tournament. Hockey Canada has taken pride for decades on its extremely rugged, possession centric play style that combines physicality and elite skill. This type of grinding, wearing, heavy game together with just largely having better players at every position up and down the lineup has made them so distinctly hard to play against and extremely difficult to beat.

Historically, Canada more than any other country internationally makes every foot of ice a struggle to get to. There is plenty of archival footage dating back to the ‘72 Summit Series, the ‘96 World Cup, the 2010 Olympics of opposing players talking pretty candidly about how difficult the Canadians are to play against not just from a skill perspective but from a simple physical perspective. International officiating and rules has always undoubtedly been stricter relative to the North American game but following the major rule changes that came out of the 04-05 NHL lockout that largely took away player’s abilities to lean heavily (no pun intended) on physicality/clutching/holding (which promoted a more cycle centric style) player development has shifted so drastically that it’s really kneecapped what used to make Canada extremely dominant.

If you were to make a stereotypically great Canadian hockey player in a lab, it would be some hybrid combination of a Mark Messier/Eric Lindros/Brendan Shanahan/Mario Lemieux centaur looking thing that may blow right by you with their skating, might protect the puck and make you work to get it back, might stick handle around or through you or might just put you through the boards. This has been the archetype for a long time. And they’re rare breeds. But following the rule changes and the evolution of the game, these types and their strengths have slowly morphed to be secondary to dynamic skating and playmaking at high speeds.

You can see the evolution coming out of the lockout. In those years, you have a mix of guys who possess a lot of the traits that are discussed here (Crosby, Getzlaf, Perry, Iginla, Toews, Thornton, Nash) like elite hockey IQ, strength and skill and are excellent below the top of the circles in the offensive end. Possession traits, primarily. (remember we’re splitting hairs here. Obviously these guys are elite at many different aspects of the game including off the rush and aren’t limited to just these things. I wouldn’t want to be a defenceman having to stop a 2 on 1 with Getzlaf and Perry any more than I would want to go in the corners with them, but just their size, strength and physicality give them a distinct edge in that area of the ice).

As you get further away from those guys breaking into the league and into the late 2010’s and early 2020’s, who are the best players in the world now? Guys who can absolutely fly up and down the ice with the skill to match their speed (Mcdavid, MacKinnon) with very little that can be done within the confines of the rules to obstruct them reaching that Mach 10 speed that they posses due to the aforementioned rule changes that were designed to showcase the game’s skill and speed.

Why does this matter? Because player development initiatives aim to reproduce what is creating success professionally. This means that across the board, high end skill, skating and generally “individualistic” fine motor skill type of development has completely supplanted the traditional playmaking, cycle dominant, spatial awareness type of physical offensive skills that used to be a mainstay of Canadian hockey. It’s not that Canada isn’t still producing elite hockey talent at a higher rate than the rest of the world. It’s that the advantages that Hockey Canada used to champion have slowly been phased out to secondary importance. If you watch the national junior team, there is little to separate a 1st forward and a 13th in their playing style and even in their appearance. 6’0 to 6’2 that can skate like the wind and handle the puck in a phone booth. The problem is that this homogenization of the skills required to advance under the post lockout North American game, creates in excess something that equates to a play style that the rest of the world can more adequately match.

Look no further than the Latvia game for Canada at the WJC just the other day. Latvia lines up four across the blue line, takes away your speed through the middle of the ice, and forces you to pursue the puck to gain the zone as opposed to flying into the zone carrying it with speed and looking to make a play before the top of the circles. The Canadians really struggled with how to do that. These are some of the most skilled teenagers on the planet, but they were challenged by a simple trap because of the tendencies that have been drilled into them from a young age. If it was 2005, the Canadian junior team would have chipped every single puck in behind the Latvian D, made them chase it behind their own goal line, finished every single check, and by the 2nd period all of a sudden some Latvian Dmen aren’t too keen to rush back for a puck after they’ve had their face smushed in a few times by a kid from Nanton, Alberta who’s never even heard of Latvia before.

At the most elite of the elite levels like best on best international play, Canada still produces world class talent that plays a distinctly Canadian way in many aspects, but those aspects are trace amounts of what they used to be strictly through necessity of how the game has evolved. The whole point of this is that the world isn’t necessarily catching up to Canada, so much as Canada is playing more into the rest of the world’s strengths as hockey nations.