In additional to growth by position (great idea Hansmoleman) I’d also be curious to know the average non-pro athlete growth during the same period. Are these athletes representative of normal human increases in height and weight during the period or is this extraordinary?

Incidentally, I’m amazed by what great athletes basketball players are for their size. Most hockey players taller than 6’5" have been pretty unimpressive. Baseball players who are that big are limited to a few positions, primarily pitching. The really tall football players are often large linemen. And yet, in basketball, guys as tall as 6’9 can be pure skill players.

The whole height/weight advantage is a terrible thing, though. It’s something completely out of a person’s control that has such huge ramifcations for your athletic future. It’s hard to express how frustrating it was growing up the shortest, lightest boy in my grade (or even the grade below) and trying to compete athletically. How guys like Marty St. Louis, Theo Fleury, and Spud Wbb kept competing and working toward the top is just astounding considering how much is working against you.

The preference for size doesn’t extend only to pros. By the time I was 8 or so I was advised to stop being a goaltender because I was too short (my parents liked this because they didn’t want to buy the equipment). When I was 13 I was on a regional soccer all-star team and the coach refused to let me play defense, despite the fact that it was the only position I’d played since I was 5, and I was always a starter with previous coaches. And of course, I was kept away from playing front row on the high school volleyball team for obvious reasons

On the plus side, last year I won gold medals as a coxswain for my University’s novice men’s rowing team – the only time my miniature size has been beneficial to athletic competition.

The answer is probably NO. As the focus on daily nutrition and fitness increase in the NHL to go along with the enhancement of the supplementation provided to the athlete’s the muscle mass to body fat ratio will only decrease over time which may result in larger, more physically toned athlete’s over time. It’s been an essential lately for all NHLers to be involved physically over the summer with fitness as well as nutrition, which has now played a more prominent role. This wasn’t the case not to long ago as Chelios and Roberts (Station 7) were one of the few pioneers in this off-season training regimine, now it’s demanded by all 30 NHL organizations that their players participate in these off-season programs.

Do you know if there was any breakdown done according to position? For instance in the NFL it seems to me the average wide receiver is probably 4 inches taller then the average cornerback/safety.

You know the expression, the bigger they are the harder they fall?

Larger people are more likely to get injured doing activities that would be comparatively low-risk for smaller, lighter people. I’m talking about things like car accidents, falling down stairs, etc.

Exactly at what point the human physique starts to become brittle simply via size I don’t know. And hockey does bring other challenges because people of different sizes compete with each other.

It’d be interesting to see how much of an NHL player’s career is spent injured versus size. But it would probably only be really interesting if there was a reliable way to sort out the injury-due-to competition with other-size players versus injuries that had more to do with you than what other people are doing to you.