The relative age effect reversal among Canadian-born NHL hockey players

Macrobius · Sep 28, 2011

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worth...s-test-for-statistical-significance.html#more

From the only Canadian Econ blog I know, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative (article is a bit geeky with graphs and stats):

Does being born in winter give you an edge at hockey? Or does it make you an underdog?

As someone with a long-term concern about relative age effects in (ice) hockey, I read with interest the article recently published in the IRSS by Benjamin Gibbs, Jonathan Jarvis and Mikaela Dufur (GJD) on "The rise of the underdog? The relative age effect reversal among Canadian-born NHL hockey players: A reply to Nolan and Howell".
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Based on this analysis, the authors conclude "Perhaps the most surprising finding is that the career duration of all Canadian-born NFL [sic] hockey players who were born in the first quarter of the year was one season shorter than those players born in the last quarter of the year (see Figure 2)."

Unfortunately the authors do not provide the reader with the basic information needed to assess their results: they provide no estimates of the statistical significance of their findings.

I set out, therefore, to replicate their work. To carry out the work more quickly, I used a different database, http://www.hockeydb.com/, which gave me a smaller sample of Canadian born NHL players (721, as opposed to GJD's 1109 players). I am not sure exactly what the source of the sample size difference is. I suspect part may be due to the choice of cut-off date. I excluded those who played in the 2009-2010 season as GJD give 2009 as their cut-off date. However if I include those players, my results look slightly closer to GJD's.

The next figure shows the average NHL career duration in years using the hockeydb.com player data for 2000-2009.

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The relative age effect reversal among Canadian-born NHL hockey players

Macrobius The Old Usager

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