It could have fairly trivially for the vast majority of use cases (no space between print and parenthesis if you want to call the function) but apparently that would have made some python maintainers unhappy. So it was ripped out and a breaking change was introduced with no recourse (not even, say, from __past__ import print_statement or something).
This is part of what I mean by demonstrating tremendous contempt for the user base and for existing code.
This would be unlike anything else in any ALGOL-extended-family language, never mind Python.