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Entries with the tag: nhl+draft
NHL Birthdays and Their Impact on Success
by Alanah McGinley on 11/26/08 at 04:58 PM ET
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A Google search today produced a seemingly unrelated link in the world of hockey news when it pointed me to a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. But looking a bit closer it seems Gladwell explores, in part, a topic that is indeed very relevant to the hockey world: players’ birthdays and the inherent statistical oddities as they affect drafting and other selection processes used to ‘create’ a successful NHL hockey player.
From Kevin Carey’s review:
The first chapter deals with the fairly well-known phenomenon of birthdays and Canadian hockey players. A hugely disproportionate number of elite hockey players have birthdays in January, February and March. That’s because the age cutoff for entry into junior hockey leagues is January 1. A five-year old hockey player born on that day (they start early in Canada) could be as much as 25 percent older than his youngest competitors, giving him a major advantage in size, strength, and coordination.
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