Drivesaitl
Time to Drive
I look forward to the read but I doubt you'll prove your point any better than you have thus far. Everything you've said in this thread screams confirmation bias:
Canadian players drafted going down despite Canadian dominance therefore NHL teams are turning their noses up against Canadian players therefore Canada wins less World Juniors. When the reverse relation - Canadian drafted players going down as a proportion of the draft due to increased quality of development from other nations therefore Canada wins less World Juniors - not only is more logically consistent but is, at worst, equally supported by your own data so far.
What my thread screams is that its always difficult to go against the grain of accepted thought, but which is not a foreign mode for a sceptic.
First, to consider that bias may operate in NHL scouting circles one has to believe in the possibility that it does.
2-3 years ago at the draft and combine NHL teams, scouting, were asking kids whether they played Fortnite. As an evaluative question. As if they were asking youth whether they had ever tried cocaine..Scouts, Managers that a generation ago had been tossing down Whiskey with Chasers were evaluating the relative harm of Fortnite. You're rarely see a more confirmed case of generational bias. yet this was confired by several sources at the combine, and it was laughable bias.
Do I need to mention the bias in the Boston boardroom discussing whats wrong with Seguin and that he doesn't fit with Boston strong culture?
Should I mention that I've followed hockey forever and that several NHL GM's turned their nose at Gretzky and several on record saying that he wouldn't even survive in the big bad NHL? That was collective NHL hockey wisdom then.
For the last number of years people have been saying that speed and skill trumps size and physicality. Indeed this was accepted as a basic truth of some sort. Despite LA KINGS, Washington Caps, STL Blues all winning on size and physicality and being impossible to contain through multiple recent championships.
I think it'd be more accurate to say that the top end quality of Canadian talent has stopped improving, whereas other countries are finding ways to better develop their top percentile of junior players. We've stagnated more than regressed imo.
To put it in terms of the draft - in the past, a weak Canadian top end meant a weak top end overall in the draft. Now it means that players from other nations take those top picks instead. I've noticed there's been a lot less variance in draft quality the past 5ish years for this reason. Now, when we don't have a McDavid or MacKinnon clearly running for the top spot, we have historically impressive Hughes, Kakko, Dahlin, Laine, Matthews.
Sorry, but I read that and have to stop myself and think about that this is the team board for the team that drafted a saviour, Connor McDavid, often talked about as one of the best young players ever, who happens to be Canadian.
NHL hockey has transitioned from Sidney Crosby being the best player in the league to Connor Mcdavid and I'm hearing in present tense the bolded.
Seriously? We're comparing the non Canadians in your list with how good McDavid, MacKinnon are? Lets see what they put up first. Laine as recently as this season even was lost in space for an extended duration in Winnipeg. Other highly touted Finns like Pulju who were thought to be equally generational, and part of a new wave of Finnish stars, is crashing and bombing out of the league.