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.

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.

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

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.