What This NHL Season Showed Us About Small Players

For years, a subset of NHL general managers has steered clear of drafting small players, fearing they would not be able to physically handle the grind of the NHL playoffs. That line of thinking may finally be dead after this past season, as three of the players who led the Carolina Hurricanes in the playoffs were under 6’0” and the team ranked 25th in average height in the NHL. Seth Jarvis, Logan Stankoven and Jackson Blake were key contributors for the Hurricanes in their run to the Stanley Cup and were all drafted within the last six years. The Hurricanes are hardly the only team to have embraced smaller, skilled players, but this year may have given the entire league enough evidence that selecting smaller players is a worthwhile gamble if they have the skill to play in the NHL.

For years, teams such as the Philadelphia Flyers, Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues and New York Islanders favored size and physicality in their prospects, often opting for brawn over skill. It’s hard to say definitively whether that was a successful line of thinking, as the Kings and Blues combined for three Stanley Cups during the 2010s, but for the Flyers, it certainly didn’t pan out.

You don’t have to look far to find additional proof of this thesis, as the team Carolina beat to reach the Stanley Cup Finals has also followed this roadmap. The Montreal Canadiens featured a lineup in this year’s playoffs led by Lane Hutson, Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield, three players who are all under 6’0”. Montreal has wholeheartedly bought into drafting the best available talent rather than concerning itself with size, which probably suits their head coach, Martin St. Louis, just fine, given that he is one of the pioneers for small players, having gone undrafted before eventually making it to the NHL and becoming a Hart Trophy winner and Hall of Famer.

Staying on the topic of smaller players, it is interesting to see former NHLer Daniel Briere at the helm in Philadelphia, given that he, too, was a smaller player and seems to have embraced selecting prospects on the smaller side. This has not historically been the Flyers’ strategy, but as more evidence of small players’ success has emerged, teams have adapted and changed their philosophies.

Looking strictly at first-round defensemen drafted from 2005 to 2020, the results for those over 6’4” and those 6’0” and under aren’t dramatically different. In terms of Norris Trophy winners, Victor Hedman is the only defender at 6’4” or taller to have won the award, while Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar are both Norris Trophy winners in the 6’0” and under category. That tiny shred of evidence doesn’t prove the thesis, but as you go down the list of taller defenders, it isn’t exactly a list of household names. Dougie Hamilton is in there and has had a great career, but beyond that there are Tyler Myers, Jamie Oleksiak, Erik Gudbranson, Nikita Zadorov, and Jared Cowen.

On the shorter players’ side, we mentioned Makar, but for every Makar you get a Ty Smith, and that is true of the taller group as well, since you could be drafting Hedman or a bust such as Mirco Müller. The list of defensemen 6’0” and under includes Ryan Ellis, Tony DeAngelo, Cameron York, Rasmus Sandin and Jamie Drysdale. While that is a solid list of defenders, there is a case to be made that more smallish players don’t make the NHL when drafted in the first round, such as the aforementioned Smith, Ryan Murphy, Ryan Merkley, and Nicolas Beaudin.

There could also be an argument that smaller defensemen don’t get afforded the same amount of leeway as their much larger contemporaries, which limits their chances of becoming full-time NHLers. It’s hard to fault NHL coaches, who are in a results-based business and likely see smaller players as potential liabilities as they try to break into the NHL full-time.

There is no better evidence that the NHL as a whole is much less concerned with size than the scoring leaderboards, where three of the top five scorers in the league were 6’0” or shorter, and 10 of the top 20 were as well. This aligns with a major shift in drafting philosophy that Sports Illustrated reported on in 2024, citing 15 years of draft data showing teams selecting smaller players on average than in previous years. That doesn’t mean teams still don’t value size, but the NHL is moving in a direction where teams will gamble on a highly skilled player, even if that player is undersized.

There is perhaps no better example of this than the Pittsburgh Penguins, who took undersized center Benjamin Kindel 11th overall in last year’s NHL Entry Draft and were criticized for selecting him so high, with many pundits calling it a reach. Kindel was marvellous for the Penguins this season, despite being just 5’11” and 182 lbs. Drafting a smaller player didn’t preclude the Penguins from going big later in the first round, as they drafted 6’2” Bill Zonnon 22nd overall, 6’5” Will Horcoff 24th overall and Peyton Kettles 39th overall.

With so many teams finding success by building around smaller players, the next few years will be particularly interesting to see whether more teams embrace this line of thinking or whether a few select teams continue to target size and toughness earlier in the draft. Just like with anything else in the NHL, it’s hard to forecast what the game will look like in a few years, but with the focus on speed and skill increasing, it could prompt teams to look for size and toughness in the later rounds and try to hit on slightly high-end skilled players.