I used to subscribe to the "Ray Shero is a Wizard" school of thought. That line of thinking held that Ray Shero was a fabulous GM who rarely made mistakes, and his brilliance was most prominently on display when making trades with other GMs. But about 18 months ago I began to question more of his moves and lose faith in his ability to build a competitive team. As events unfolded this year and more evidence came to light, my opinion on Ray Shero permanently shifted. One thing I didn't think, though, was that Ray Shero was xenophobic. But some have argued he was. I'd like to see if this is true.
There's a great website called Quant Hockey that has a graph of NHL player nationality going back approximately 100 years. It highlights that the NHL was almost entirely Canadian through 1970, and that the league was 90% American and Canadian players through 1990. What's more, even in today's age of tolerance and the free flow of information, roughly 75% of the league is still composed of American and Canadian players. Here's the graph (please click all images to enlarge).
This provides us a basis for defining xenophobia in hockey: the avoidance of players who aren't Canadian or American. I'll lazily call that group Europeans. The difficulty in measuring xenophobia though is that there isn't an optimal number of Europeans to have on your team; some bad teams have a lot and some good teams have very few.
So to get around this, I'm going to look at the number of Europeans on each team that won the Cup in the last seven seasons (the Behind the Net era). Since rosters change mid-season due to trades and injuries, I'm going to count the number of Europeans on each team's roster during the regular season and the playoffs using the data at Quant Hockey. I'm including players who played in 20 or more regular season games (10 in the lockout-shortened year) and/or 4 or more playoff games for each team in each year.
The two things that stick out to me are (1) how much of an outlier Detroit is and (2) how few Europeans were on any of these Stanley Cup winning teams. Other than Detroit, only the 2013 Blackhawks had more than five Europeans play in 20 or more games during the regular season, or 4 or more games during the playoffs. Indeed, the Hawks in 2010 and the Bruins in 2011 each only had four European players play four or more games in the playoffs.
The LA Kings were even more American/Canadian-centric. They only had five European skaters meet the games played threshold in either the regular season or the playoffs in their two years combined. That's because they only had two or three European skaters on their team at any one time.
With this in mind, here are the numbers for the Penguins over that same time period.
Those numbers are right in line with the ones we saw above for each Stanley Cup champion over the last seven years; European skaters generally comprised between ten and twenty percent of the winning roster. In terms of raw numbers, the Stanley Cup winners averaged 5.7 European skaters to play 20 or more games in the regular season and 5.3 European skaters to play four or more games in the playoffs. If you remove Detroit from the equation, you get 4.7 European skaters in the regular season and 4.3 in the playoffs.
The Penguins are very close to that. They averaged 3.6 European skaters in the regular season and 3.7 in the playoffs, which is on the cusp of the group without Detroit. Even including Detroit doesn't change the picture that much. And the most reassuring thing is that the Penguins have had more Europeans during this time than the Kings have had during their two Cup runs. They're good company to be in, and if Ray Shero is xenophobic, so is Dean Lombardi (a conclusion I suspect those who originally made the xenophobic claim don't want to reach).
Of course, the NHL in general might still be xenophobic, but that's entirely different than pinning this all on one man. Ray Shero might not have established European scouts as quickly as he should have, but given that the NHL is still 75% North American, delay in scouting Europeans is natural.
I've come to the opinion that Ray Shero should have been fired after he failed to move on from Fleury after the Philly series. Though he was fired two years too late, he was fired for justifiable reasons--asset management being the biggest one. Xenophobia, on the other hand, was never an issue, unless you believe that the Kings, Bruins, and Hawks suffer from the same problem. I don't think that's the case.