SIZE DOES MATTER
(Oct 2009)
All else being equal (talent, work ethic, etc.) a larger player has an advantage in his 10Y over a smaller one, particularly when it comes to defensemen.
· The degree of importance that a player’s size has on projecting his future success is severely overestimated by the majority of professional scouts.
Scouts do a pretty good job of identifying the good defensemen, but by overemphasizing size, they also get a good number of false positives which eat up valuable early-round draft picks.
SIZE DOES MATTER ESPECIALLY FOR DEFENSE
point production in the CHL is a good indicator of NHL success. Similarly, a player who is taller than average also increases their chances of success. If you combine both factors positively in a young CHL forward, their chance of success rises greatly.
weight and found it has little correlation with success,
The bigger a player is the more successful his cohorts have been in becoming regular NHLers.
It’s clear the trend shows that the bigger and the higher producing a player is, the higher their success rates of their cohorts has been.
HEIGHT MATTERS BUT ONLY BECAUSE OF BIAS
A player’s height in the CHL significantly matters in terms of predicting IF a player makes the NHL, but doesn’t seem to matter when you look at players with a single NHL game played (or more) – ie how many games they played.
Once a player has established themselves as a player at the NHL or European Elite league level, their height is no longer relevant.
DRAFTING FOR SKILL AND TRADING FOR SIZE
the reason you want to draft for skill was simply that skill players have a higher success rate than big players who don’t score as much.
In essence, trading for size was actually harder than trading for scoring, but you ended up better off drafting for skill because those players tend to become stars far more often.
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