SIZE DOESN’T MATTER
In the new NHL, smaller players such as Marner, Skinner and Gaudreau now have a chance to become stars
The puck control relay event at the All-Star Skills Competition could have used a warning. Maybe one of those “Must Be This Tall To Ride” signs you see at the amusement parks — except flipped the other way around.
For once, it paid to be small.
Can you imagine Zdeno Chara trying to wedge his 6-foot-9 frame through a set of obstacles that were designed to test a player’s agility, edge work, stickhandling and nimbleness? Players not only had to deke through a straight line of 10 pucks, but then had to zigzag around eight pylons, before putting the puck lacrossestyle through a set of flashing vertical gates.
Not surprisingly, it was the Lilliputians of the game who dominated.
Johnny Gaudreau, who at 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds has become the poster boy for the pint-sized player, won the event for the second straight year with a time of 27.045 seconds. Patrick Kane, who is an inch and 12 pounds heavier, finished second with a 28.611 time.
“You’ve got stickhandling, you’ve got to work on your edges, your crossovers, your power turns,” said Gaudreau, breaking down all the skills at work that made him the third-highest scorer this season. “And then you’ve got to work a little magic with the stick.”
A little magic. That’s a good way of describing Gaudreau’s sleight of hand when it comes to manipulating the game. At times, it seems as though he’s got the puck under a spell, like he’s traded his wand for a hockey stick. And with a generation of players who seem to have graduated from Hogwarts School of Hockey Wizardry, he’s far from being alone in that regard.
Never before has the NHL been blessed with so many skilled players. And never before have they been so slight in size.
Five of the top-10 scorers, including current Art Ross Trophy leader Nikita Kucherov, are under 6-feet. That doesn’t include all-stars such as Columbus’ Cam Atkinson (5-foot-8 and 179 pounds), Buffalo’s Jeff Skinner (5-foot-11 and 187 pounds) or Carolina’s Sebastian Aho (6-feet tall and 176 pounds). And while Vancouver’s Elias Pettersson is practically a giant compared to those other players, his 6-foot-2 and 176-pound body means he actually might be the smallest out there.
“The game is changing. Maybe there’s more skill now than strength before,” said Pettersson, who leads all rookies with 45 points in 40 games. “Everyone knows I’m not big, so I’ve got to keep my feet moving otherwise I’m easy to
Hopefully we can keep paving the way for younger kids. Hopefully they realize you don’t need to be a giant to play in this league. You need to be smart, fast, skilled and be able to see the ice and read the ice well. There’ s a future in the NHL for those guys. Johnny Gaudreau
defend. If I have my feet moving, I can be creative and be hard to read. It’s the style I’ve played for a long time. I’m happy that it comes successfully.”
The idea that the game is getting smaller is sort of old news by now. And yet, it’s still hard not to marvel at how jockey-sized players are able to survive in a league where Chara and Shea Weber are patrolling the blue line.
Can’t big-bodied defencemen, such as 6-foot-4 and 210-pound Seth Jones, intimidate anymore?
“Yeah, I make them scared of me,” laughed Jones. “No, I mean I think it’s their speed. You see how quick the game is going and these guys are so good. You see a guy like (Toronto’s Mitch) Marner and how fast he is and you pair that with creativity and skill, it’s tough. The game is getting a little less physical, less stick checks and things like that, so it seems like there’s more open ice out there and these guys are taking advantage of it.”
“Oh yeah, it’s all about if you can play,” added Winnipeg forward Mark Scheifele, who is 6-foot-3 and 207 pounds. “You watch a guy like Johnny Gaudreau in the corners and he’s just as strong as any other guy, just because of how good he is at spinning off contact and protecting pucks.”
Indeed, the old school thinking that the smaller players would not be able to last in the league where it still pays to have a Tom Wilson or a Ryan Reaves on the roster has been turned on its head. It’s the bigger, slower players who are now being run out of the league.
As Gaudreau once said, “You can’t hit what you can’t catch.”
Perhaps that was why it was intriguing to see 5-foot-2 U.S. women’s national team member Kendall Coyne zip around the rink — at a speed faster than Arizona’s Clayton Keller — and for 5-foot-4 Brianna Decker actually record the best time in the Premier Passer competition. Speed and skill now trumps size. And if players, such as Kane, Gaudreau and Pettersson, have found a way to survive in the big, bad NHL, then maybe there could be hope one day for a women’s player, such as Coyne or Decker, doing the same
After all, there was a time when Gaudreau felt the need to stuff his shorts with hockey pucks in an attempt to artificially add weight when hockey scouts put him on the scales. Now, players would be wiser to spend time in the sauna in order to cut unnecessary pounds.
“It’s great to see,”
Gaudreau said of the way that the game has changed. “Hopefully we can keep paving the way for younger kids. Hopefully they realize you don’t need to be a giant to play in this league. You need to be smart, fast, skilled and be able to see the ice and read the ice well.
“There’s a future in the NHL for those guys.”