Sorry about the Kundera reference, but the plight of skinny hockey players like Wayne McBean swung too phonetically close to leave it alone. The thing is, McBean came into the league floating on high expectations, but when it came to the bigs he really never fit the demands of playing defense at a high level. Maybe you can't chalk it up entirely to his size, but weighing 185 pounds (~84 kg) at 6'2" (1.88 m) was not exactly going to prepare him for an NHL that shifted towards forwards like Eric Lindros.
A player like McBean made me think a bit about contemporary skinny players and what might be distinct about them. Are they exclusively younger players? Skilled players? How many of them were defensemen? How many are skinnier than Wayne McBean? These things can get out of control quickly.
I figured the best way to go about this is to present height and weight (in that order) as a ratio. League-wide, the average height this year is just a little over 6'1" (1.85 m), and the weight a bit over 204 pounds (~93 kg), for a McBean ratio of .3584. True McBean was at .4. The highest ratio in the league was .45; the lowest was .298.
I took all my data from hockey-reference.com, and this is out of 672 skaters. I left goalies out because Ryan Miller would be like a 1.0 and Martin Brodeur would be around .000000001 and I didn’t want that to fudge my beloved ratio.
Highest McBean Ratios (Skinny), Top 25 2010-11
Brandon Pirri — .45
T.J. Brodie — .4294
Michael Grabner — .4235
Tyler Ennis — .4233
Steve Sullivan — .4224
Oliver Ekman-Larsson — .4205
Alexander Burmistrov — .4176
Mike Ribeiro — .4162
Drew Miller — .4157
Claude Giroux — .4128
Frans Nielsen — .4128
Mark Olver — .4118
Dan Sexton — .4118
Petr Prucha — .4114
Brandon Sutter — .4098
Mathieu Perreault — .4096
Keaton Ellerby — .4086
David Krejci — .4068
Erik Karlsson — .4057
Pat Dwyer — .4057
David Van Der Gulik — .4046
Wayne Simmonds — .4044
Ryan Shannon — .4035
Jordan Eberle — .4023
Oskars Bartulis — .4022
Lowest McBean Ratios (Stocky), Top 25 2010-11
Dustin Byfuglien — .298
Derek Boogaard — .3038
Pavel Kubina — .304
Steve MacIntyre — .308
Frazer McLaren — .308
John Scott — .31
Dustin Penner — .3102
Sean O’Donnell — .3122
Douglas Murray — .3125
Kevin Westgarth — .3128
Mike Komisarek — .3128
Brian Boyle — .3135
Anthony Stewart — .3149
Matt Greene — .3165
Raitis Ivanans — .3167
Matt Smaby — .3167
Zdeno Chara — .3176
Andy Sutton — .3184
Mark Fistric — .3205
Mike Grier — .3216
Ben Eager — .3217
Guillaume Latendresse — .3217
Ilya Kovalchuk — .3217
Milan Jurcina — .322
Erik Johnson — .322
These lists are interesting, in part because there's a lot of mixed value among the skinny players and a pretty static value among the stouter players. You have quite a few middling forwards at the skinny end, with a few incredible talents thrown in there, whereas the stout players are almost universally goon- or defensive-types. It is a bit interesting to see the last few names on the list, though, such as Kovalchuk (Kovalchunk?) and Johnson. Quite a few of the skinny players are rookies or just young; league-wide, only 27 players were skinnier than True McBean, and only a couple of defensemen, so you have a pretty good idea of where he'd stand today.
What would be intriguing would be to identify a sort of “critical mass” (literally and figuratively) for how much weight an average NHL player should build up to before not having to worry about lightness compromising their effectiveness. Of course, talent can trump size in some (rare) cases, and what role a player is filling factors in, but most of us would agree that there is a category of “too skinny for the NHL,” where a player will be more effective when they “fill out.” In that same manner, there’s likely a “too fat for the NHL” too, and I’m pretty sure Kyle Wellwood‘s toed that line.
One of the things I'm going to do is track player performance this year with their size in mind, and see where we end up. I won't reach back because I'm having trouble gaining any confidence on height/weight data from the past. A lot of that information is adjusted to their updated height and weight.
I'm going to throw together a team version of this later; by the way, I'm not sincerely trying to create a metric called the "McBean Ratio."
