Time of birth makes difference

Study suggests NHL guilty of age bias

Parents worried about whether their child has the goods to make it into the NHL might now have another seemingly arbitrary factor working against them — the time of year their hockey prodigy was born.

A study, published Wednesday in the online science journal PLOS ONE, suggests that the NHL is guilty of an age bias because it weighs its draft selections more heavily in favour of players born earlier in the year. The report found that 36 per cent of players drafted by NHL teams between 1980 and 2007 were born in the first quarter of those years, or from January to March, compared to 14.5 per cent of draftees who were born in the fourth quarter.

Rob Deaner, one of the study’s authors, said it has been widely known that a socalled selection bias exists in various sports and educational pursuits, but it hasn’t been demonstrated before in the NHL.

“It’s never been shown that people are systematically underestimating the ability of the younger players,” said Deaner, an associate professor of psychology at the Grand Valley State University in Michigan. “We found the teams are consistently underestimating how good the guys are that are born from July to December.”

The authors looked at about 2,700 Canadian players drafted by NHL teams over a 27-year period, finding that those born in the third and fourth quarters were drafted more than 40 slots later than their productivity warranted.

Younger players may be just as good, but might not be as big or as skilled and will likely end up in a lower league.