NHL statistics

I'm a bit of a statistic nut. When I was but a teenager I would sit and watch cars pass my house and I would mark down what colour they were. I had a bar graph to show the ratio of car colours on the road. Maybe I was more than a nut.

I've recently been interested to know what the make-up of the NHL is. This all comes from the official sites of the the NHL teams.

You might be interested to know that 56% of the NHL players are Canadian born while 23% are out of North America and 21% are from the USA. By the way, there are 954 players on team rosters currently. Of the 56% Canadian players 39% of THAT number are from Ontario, 17% from Alberta, 12% from Quebec, 11% from Saskatchewan, 10% from BC, 6% from Manitoba, 2% from Nova Scotia and the remaining 2% from Newfoundland and New Brunswick.

Of the 23% from other countries, the greatest number of NHL players in this category come from Sweden making up 22% of that statistic. The Czech Republic, Finland and Russia hold the next highest spots with 19%, 17% and 13%. Slovakia is next in line with 8% of the total international playes and then Germany with 5%. The few remain players come from a variety of countries - 5 from Latvia, 4 from Belarus, 3 from Denmark and Switzerland, 2 from the Ukraine, Slovenia and Kazakhstan. There is only 1 person from each of these countries currently on an NHL roster: Italy, Austria, Poland, France, Ireland, Lithuania, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Japan, Norway and Brunei. The fella from Brunei was raised in Alberta Canada and has the last name Adams which leads me to suspect that though he was BORN in Brunei (tiny Asian country near the equator) his parents could very likely have been Canadian already.

Some other interesting facts: The Philadelphia Flyers have the highest percentage of Canadian players on their roster - 80%. Pittsburgh Penguins have the highest % of American players - 39% of their total players are American. And the Florida Panthers have the highest % of international players - 40%. The New York Rangers are the only team's roster who's American and International players outnumber their Canadian players ... and that only by 1 - 8, 8 and 7. It is also interesting to note that there is quite the discrepancy in the number of players that any NHL team may have on their roster. While the Detroit Red Wings have 48 players on their roster, San Jose have only 19. It may be that teams chose to put players on their roster that they are still considering for their team for the coming year while others choose to limit to those they know they will play. Florida's website has two lists. One with 20 players (called their roster) and one with 48 (called 'In the System'). San Jose have 4 different lists on their site. Their Roster - 19, their Rookie Games Roster - 26, their Training Camp Roster - 29 and their 'In the System' Roster or all their prospects - 48. For the purposes of my statistics I took only players who were on what a team called their Roster. I did not include prospects intentionally.