Devils American Made

According to the New York Times, the New Jersey Devils have the most players from the United States of any team in the N.H.L., 14. (A 15th, Cam Janssen, has played 28 games with the Devils this season but is in the minors.)

The next closest team is the Islanders, with eight. Several teams in the league have as few as one. The Rangers have four. Given that active rosters are limited to 23 players, the number of Americans is an astounding majority for the Devils. “I can assure you, it wasn’t by design,” said Lou Lamoriello, the Devils’ president and general manager. “It is a unique roster. We have American players who played junior hockey in Canada. We have international players that went to college. It just happened that we ended up with a lot of Americans.”

As the team came together over the summer, center Scott Gomez — a longtime Devil who is from Alaska — said the players joked about becoming “America’s team.”

“We were going to get a softball game going, the Canadians versus the Americans, and they started having to recruit the Europeans,” Gomez said, laughing. “I think you have trends. One year it seemed like we had six or seven Russians, and then we had a lot of Czechs. It’s an American year, I guess.”

The Rangers also did not construct their team in order to fly different flags around their rink. Both franchises are coached by Canadians, Tom Renney for the Rangers and Claude Julien for the Devils. Their captains are Czechs, Rangers right wing Jaromir Jagr and Devils left wing Patrik Elias.

In recent years, the Rangers’ road has become the more common one; the N.H.L. has grown more international, although Canadians still dominate the league. Of the approximately 670 players on N.H.L. rosters, which change almost daily, nearly half are Canadian. About 120 are United States natives, with about 70 Czechs, 43 Swedes and 45 from countries that made up the Soviet Union.
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