In 2011 Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outlier: The Story Of Success” he has a chapter on hockey and how much of an advantage is it for kids to be born earlier in the year.
As you know in minor hockey you are grouped in your birth year but kids born in January on average will be bigger, taller and stronger than kids born in December. This gives the earlier in the year born kids a head start and a big advantage.
The theory is that players born earlier in the year will, for the most part, be the better players than other kids in their age group, so growing up they will continue to be on the best teams, play with and against better players, get better coaching and the players born later in the year will struggle to ever be at the same level.
This doesn’t guarantee that late birthday’s mean no success as Mario Lemieux was born in October, Sidney Crosby in August and 2014 WHL MVP Sam Reinhart in November.
As of January 3, 2017 I calculated 531 players in the WHL. These are players who have been in the league all season or look to stay the rest of the season.
The number include Import players and American born players so this is not an in depth look at Canadian Minor Hockey.
This is just some research to see if the numbers show any trends in the WHL.
For example it’s no surprise that 81.1 % of the 16-year-old players in the WHL were born in the first 4 months of the year. At this age there would be an expected advantage to be 5-11 months older than other players.
In fact the numbers do change as the 17-year-olds show that 53.3% are from the first 4 months, 18-year-olds is 50.4%, 19-year-olds is 47.8% and 20-year-olds is 56.5%.
But these numbers are pretty significant considering that 4 months is 33.3% of the year and in each age group there is a lot more than 33.3% of the players born in the earlier months.
More stats show …
– 73.3% of all players were born January-June.
– 54.2% were born January-April.
– 41.6% were born January-March.
– 31.6% were born April-June.
– 16.2% were born in January, 3% in December.
– Of the players born in 2000, 81.1% were born January-April.
| 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | |
| January 86 | 10 | 21 | 21 | 17 | 17 |
| February 63 | 8 | 13 | 11 | 20 | 11 |
| March 72 | 9 | 17 | 22 | 17 | 7 |
| April 67 | 8 | 15 | 17 | 19 | 8 |
| May 55 | 9 | 15 | 10 | 17 | 4 |
| June 46 | 3 | 17 | 12 | 13 | 1 |
| July 38 | 2 | 11 | 10 | 13 | 2 |
| August 18 | 4 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 0 |
| September 31 | 3 | 8 | 12 | 8 | 0 |
| October 21 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 5 | 1 |
| November 18 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 1 |
| December 16 | 0 | 6 | 7 | 2 | 1 |
| Total 531 | 62 | 138 | 141 | 137 | 53 |
