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In terms of knowledge and insight, I’m not sure there’s better message board discussion of hockey anywhere on the internet than on my own thread. And that has nothing to do with me. Rather, it's my readers. So often, my job is made easier when blog topics just arise out of the previous couple of days’ discussion on my thread. And this is one of them.

The debate has been: does size or skill matter more in the NHL these days. Many teams, including especially the Hawks are now drafting kids who can best be described as tiny or "waif-like."

I’ll take the easy way out: both size and speed/skill matter.

But that said, there’s a different set of metrics in the regular season, and the season that really matters, the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Typically, smaller, more skilled teams can race through the regular season, racking up wins and points—and then they falter somewhere in the playoffs. Like, say, the 2011 Vancouver Canucks, who wilted in the Stanley Cup Finals in the face of a bigger—and less skilled—Boston Bruins club.

Even the Blackhawks, a notoriously “smaller” club the last few years, especially after selling off Dustin Byfuglien, Andrew Ladd and Troy Brouwer between 2010 and 2011, “played big” in the playoffs on the way to the 2013 Stanley Cup, with devastating hits from Bryan Bickell, Andrew Shaw, Brent Seabrook and even Dave Bolland that made a difference in more than one series.

And it was a failure to match the Kings’ size and speed, it can be argued, that wore the Hawks down in the 2014 Western Conference Finals.

In my view, it works like this. Skill is now table stakes. If you can’t possess the puck, outshoot your opponent, generate positive Corsi, and capitalize on your power play opportunities, you’re just not going to be a winning hockey team.

So that makes you a skilled, winning hockey team. Congratulations, you’re a top 8 seed in your conference, and in the playoffs.

But, in the playoffs, if you lack size and physicality, look out, that light in the tunnel might be the train coming at you.

Officiating changes in the playoffs. Happens year after year. Clutches, grabs, hooks . . . don’t get called nearly as much. When a player has an opponent lined up for a hit, he’s taking it. Injuries and fatigue take their toll.

Year after year, the team that wears the crown, including the 2010 and 2013 Chicago Blackhawks, is a team that was willing and able to step up physically at crunch time.

And this is why the Kings—and not the Hawks, have won 2 of the last 3 Stanley Cups. The Kings, who ousted the Hawks in 7 games in the 2014 WCF, because they added speed in the summer and fall of 2013 to complement their size, and were able to not only skate with the Hawks the following Spring, but were also fairly routinely able to outmuscle them.

It’s not about size versus skill and speed, anymore, if it ever was. It’s about size and skill and speed.


All for now,


JJ

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