Terry Frei Credits NHL For USA Hockey Growth

(above) DU players from non-traditional hockey areas pose in shirts from their hometowns or regions


Terry Frei in Sunday's Denver Post, quoted Mike Chambers article on Friday highlighting the growth of American hockey in non-traditional hockey areas. Certainly the University of Denver's recruiting has improved in recent seasons, due in large part, to U.S. players born west of the Mississippi River.
"Mike Chambers' Friday story on the University of Denver's increasing reliance on U.S.-born talent — and talent from outside the "traditional" U.S. hockey areas — and the continuing world junior championships in Buffalo, N.Y., serve to emphasize something for which the NHL rarely is given sufficient credit. For all the whining about Gary Bettman's Sun Belt and "grow the game" strategy, it has played a significant role in the expansion of the talent pool (both geographically and numerically) and interest in the game on this side of the U.S.-Canadian border."
-Terry Frei, Denver Post

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find it a little odd that the picture appears to be of players from "non-traditional hockey areas" yet there are the guys from Chicago, Wisconsin, and Connecticut and I don't see any of the guys from Colorado. Is that to imply Colorado is more of a hockey hotbed than Connecticut? HA!

Anonymous said...

I don't see Zucker or Shore in the picture. Obviously Zucker is from a non-traditional state. I think the picture was probably taken pretty recently and they were both at the WJC. Also, DU has several Colorado born players on the team and they probably wanted to leave out the Colorado guys so there weren't 20 kids in the picture.

But, agreeing that Colorado should be included on the list, it's pretty amazing how many guys on our team are from non-traditional hockey areas.

puck swami said...

They've done plenty of stories on Colorado players. The point was to highlight other US areas that are bringing players to DU.