Size Doesn’t Matter

By Chad Cranmer
Igor Larionov was considered by many people to be the best playmaker in the world not named Wayne Gretzky during the 1980’s when he was centering the famed KLM line on the Soviet Red Army team. Generously listed at 5’11” and only weighing 170 pounds, Larionov managed to put together a brilliant international career before finally playing in the NHL in 1989 as a 29-year-old rookie. If he was an 18-year-old rookie today, he might not have been given a chance to play in the NHL. With the trend in the NHL towards big bodies, he probably would have been considered too small. Many general managers today would rather take a 6’4” 215 pound center with limited skills than a 5’ 9” 165 pound center who can skate and handle the puck. The thought is that you can’t teach size, but you can’t teach skills that a player just does not have the physical tools for, either. Players like Theo Fleury, Pat Verbeek, and Larionov have proven that small players can be top line NHL players.

If you look at some of the most feared body checkers in the game in the last decade, most of those players are not huge. Vladimir Konstantinov weighed 190 pounds. Mike Peca is not much bigger. Chris Chelios is listed at 6’1” 186 pounds, and yet he has sent more than his share of opponents to the trainer’s table. “Terrible Ted” Lindsay, one of the toughest men ever to play the game was only 5’ 10” and weighed 160 pounds! Compare them to the passive 210 pound Larry Murphy or Mario Lemieux, who weighed 220 pounds, and you have to wonder why is it that the small guys are the ones doing most of the hitting instead of the bigger guys.

People complain that the talent pool is too thin to support 30 NHL teams. Maybe that’s true if teams continue to pass over smaller players in the draft and refuse to even give them a chance. Out of the 111 players taken in the first round since 1997, only seven were smaller than 6’0” 180 ponds. Players like 165 pound Redwings draftee Niklas Kronval, 5’9” Lightning forward Martin St. Louis, and 5’ 8” Montreal forward Francis Bouillion might be part of a new breed of hockey player, where size isn’t the most important factor in a draft. Maybe it is time so see which is more important, the size of the body or the size of the heart.