The Hockey Miracle in the Middle of Nowhere

In 2007, something happened in the NHL that had never been seen before. For the first time in the league’s 90 year history a player from Denmark, a tiny country with no hockey tradition, took to the ice. And it didn’t stop there. In the following years, even more Danish players unexpectedly broke through to the NHL. But the most amazing part of this story, is that these players didn’t just come from Denmark. Unbelievably, they all came from the same small town. Welcome to Herning, a town with a population of only 50,000 in the middle of nowhere in Western Denmark. But in just nine years, Herning sensationally produced five NHL players. In the same time period, Chicago produced three, and Detroit produced four. This is the story about how little Herning against all logic become a hotbed of NHL players.