LOS ANGELES -- One of the catch-phrases NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is often hammered for, mostly in the Canadian media, is his plan for the league to have a pan-American "footprint."

That has been the driving force behind having franchises in non-traditional markets like Tampa and Phoenix, the notion that the NHL would have a presence or profile from coast to coast in the United States.

You can debate the successes and failures of Bettman's "footprint" plan until you are blue in the face. But if you watched the record 11 American players troop to the stage in the first round of this weekend's draft and the record-tying 21 that were selected through the first two rounds, you'd be hard-pressed to suggest there isn't a correlation to the league's "footprint" and the wave of American talent that continues to inundate the draft.

http://espn.go.com/nhl/blog/_/name/n...record-numbers