February takes a dip – is it because Pisces aren’t any good at hockey? Or their lack of commitment?

James, as Malcolm points out in his ESPN Q&A, there could be a lot of players helped by having a parallel league with a second registration period in the summer. Is this feasible and is there enough room for twice the amount of kids given a shot to become elite? Or, is there a “scarcity of resources” in the Canadian hockey establishment meaning there is only so much ice time and slots on feeder teams (feeding the major junior league) and there is no realistic way to counteract the birthdates?

There was an article a while back (link here) on Slate.com that talked about this a bit. Things like relative age and how different deadlines helps or hinders development of athletes. I know we talked about it a bit on HF’s staff board and how it worked with minor hockey cutoffs and birthdates. You see it quite a bit in junior hockey with where a birth date falls compared to the draft date and also how that works with the eligibilty date for CHL (like when a player is considered a over-ager etc.) Actually, I had a conversation with a scout about this during the last Q game I was at. The player we were discussing is a rookie this season, but isn’t eligible to be drafted until 2011. We were debating whether this helped or hindered the player and if the increased exposure of an extra year in the CHL would counteract the fact that he would naturally be better than most of his age group and it would be a bit harder to accurately judge his talent.

As the proud father of a daughter who was born on Gladwell’s optimal hockey player date (Jan. 2), I’ve already spent her first signing bonus.

Gladwell better be right!

Interesting stuff. Researchers picked up on a similar trend in soccer, too — it got some coverage back around the World Cup 2006.

From that story:

Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, it’s Dec. 31.

So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick?

I did a quick regression with both:
 - number of players vs. birth month (r2 = 82%, r=0.91)
 - points per game vs. birth month. (r2 = 53%, r=0.73)
n = 1210

The younger group (Jul – Dec) scored on average 0.43 points per game, where the older group (Jan – Jun) scored 0.36 points per game (significant difference)