Do Shorter NHL Players get Injured more often?

When looking to draft future NHL players, shorter athletes are traditionally overlooked with a feeling that they will not be able to compete in more physically mature leagues like the National Hockey League (NHL). Regardless of their production in high-quality junior leagues, shorter athletes still tend to get drafted later than their stats would suggest (e.g. Alex DeBrincat, Logan Stankoven). I was curious if shorter players actually cannot handle "big boy" hockey and if there is any relationship between height and injury frequency.

Process

The first step was to use NHL Injury Viz to get my injury data. I originally began with only 2015-2023 data but then found issues with the COVID seasons and the quantity of data that would need to be manually evaluated, so I simplified it to 2021-2023 (2 full NHL seasons). I also removed the following injury types from NHL Injury Viz's sortable database before downloading:

Each of these "injuries" did not seem to fit as a consequence of playing a hockey game, which was the goal of this height vs. in-game injury study, so they were removed.

Next, I went to NHL.com and sorted 2021-2023 stats by the "Bio Info" option to get NHL players' heights who had played 1+ games within that two-season period. I downloaded each page of 100 NHL players and then combined all the data into a Microsoft Excel file to continue my data cleaning and analysis.

Working in Microsoft Excel

Beginning with the NHL.com data, I got every player's bio info into a sortable table and created a new column to adjust positions to only "F", "D", and "G". Next, I  went through the injury data and found that the names were in Last, First form rather than First Last form like the NHL data. Using the "convert text to table" option in Microsoft Excel and both "comma" and "space" selected as Delimeters, I was able to separate the names and build a new column with each injury record's name to First Last form for easier future syncing with the NHL.com height data.

I then used formulas including XLOOKUP to get the position, height, and weight next to each injured record, and also get the "SUM of Injured Games" number from the adjacent columns copied from the NHL Injury Viz-exported data that splits data into 82 columns for each injured/non-injured game in a regular season or playoffs.

I did not separate playoffs or regular season data in this project for injuries since I did not separate games played from NHL.com downloads into both options. Future research could show us playoffs vs. regular season injury info, but since the sample I was using was only two seasons, I kept it all together. Here are some stats from the initial dataset:

% of Players Injured (Min. 1 injury):

% of Injured GP Share (among all players):

Injuries are prevalent in professional hockey, with 59.9% of all NHL players from the 2021-2023 seasons missing at least 1 game due to injury.

Initial Findings

The first general finding I wanted to find was the cumulative total of injuries per each "inch" from the last two seasons. As you can see by the graph below, the uniform distributions for both 2021-2023 NHL Players and 2021-2023 Injuries show a similar trend with more injuries by "inches" in the more common heights (e.g. more NHL players are 6'0" - 6'3" and more injuries are happening with that larger sample).

With this in mind, I knew I had to move to injury rates per player rather than total injuries because there was an uneven amount of players per inch/height range.

Some NHL Player "leaders" from the 2021-2023 Dataset:

Most Injured player (Min. 1 GP): 

Markus Nutivaara (D)

Team(s): 2021-2022 Florida Panthers

Height: 73 inches (6'1")

2021-2023 GP: 1

Games Missed Due to Injury: 173

Most Individual Injuries:

Erik Cernak (D)

Team(s): 2021-2023 Tampa Bay Lightning

Height: 75 inches (6'3")

2021-2023 GP: 125

Injuries: 9 (41 Games missed)

Smallest NHL player from sample: 

Rocco Grimaldi (F)

Team: 2021-2022 Nashville Predators

Height: 66 inches (5'6")

Tallest NHL player from sample: 

Zdeno Chara (D)

Team: 2021-2022 New York Islanders

Height: 81 inches (6'9")

Conclusions

After sorting the database by position, here are the injury rates per height and position:

Individual-Inch Graph

Here is the same data but grouped into two-inch groups:

Two-inch Increments Graph

Based on the data and trendlines from these graphs, there is little to no relationship between height and injury frequency. Interesting to note that defenders have the lowest R-squared value in both graphs above, implying that defenders of all heights do not have any unique injury prevention ability whether taller or shorter (all positions seem to show this anyways).

Pretty much every R-squared value for the injury rate groups is 0, aside from the 25% Forwards R-squared value when we grouped heights into two-inch increments. This is still not good enough to signify a trend. However, it is interesting to note that there is a version of this data that subtly suggests an increased possibility of injury in taller NHL forwards than in shorter NHL forwards. Again, this is not definitive and if you look at the individual-inch graph above you can see the visual volatility that helps us prove:

There is little-to-no relationship between height and NHL in-game injury frequency.

Shorter NHL players do not get injured more than taller players.