The ability to change direction/speed isn't a function of mass[/B]? I'm not sure why you would choose to invoke physics in your argument only to end up here.
I'm not even sure why you bring up McDavid. He is not an effective player in physical contact, at all. He is, however, the most effective player in hockey. He's a lanky beanpole with very little mass to accelerate (gee, there seems to be some sort of a proportionality relationship developing here) which influences how he plays the game. If anything he's built and perambulates like a cheetah: he floats around until it's go time, at which point nobody can touch him. Whereas you're at least suggesting that future players will be built more like super lions who can somehow keep up with cheetahs.
Change of directions: this only relevant if the mass to strength/resistance ratio are different. Things like genetics makes this highly variable. Lebron came to the NBA with a 7 foot body that could be as agile as anyone of any size.
McDavid is very agile, why mix the physical contacts with this? McDavid is also not light by any measure (195lbs).
What gets people confused is that most athletes get too much weight on them while training always the same muscles groups and not their sub-groups, they modify their speed, while reducing their agility. For most its the right decision.
They were already reversed once. After the 2005 lockout everything was being called. Then less and less things were called as more and more borderline infractions became psychologically normalized, while refs wanted to avoid ''deciding games'' which caused a prolonged decline in scoring, even as the game got faster. This trend was reversed just this year.
I don't find the comparison to the NBA convincing at all. They're different games emphasizing completely different skills attributes entirely. For one, the average height in the NBA is 6'7, whereas there are hardly any effective hockey players at that height. Clearly this is all just a coincidence and has nothing to do with the fact that the scoring area is suspended 10 feet in the air. Moreover, this trend doesn't exist in all positions, in all sports. For example, NFL running backs have gotten shorter over time, while their weight has been relatively constant over the last 50 years. Now, the NFL is far more specialized than hockey or basketball, and perhaps second only to Baseball in terms of specialization. Athletes in the NFL are perhaps the most physically optimized for the demands of their position. Tell me, for which physical attribute do you think an RB is optimized?
My father was a RB, it's a mix of speed, agility, low-center of gravity (hard to tackle), horizontal size and resistance to contacts (flexibility) . Most teams have different RBs with a different mix of these attributes for different plays (unless they have an elite guy who have all of these so high that it doesn't matter). My father was all agility, so he was the guy returning the kicks and on first downs. They had someone faster and harder to tackle for short gains(3yds-5yds) situation. And then the TE is used for 1 yard situations, because they are very hard to tackle. As you can see on this link:
Running backs getting shorter and heavier specialization towards smaller exist, because there are clear tactical advantage to that specialization to meet the goal of said player. All NFL players who are not RB are growing in size, while RBs are optimizing for all 5 attributes.
There is no equivalence to that phenomenon at hockey, scorers could be 7 foot, but basketball/volleyball tend to aggressively recruit tall people, so your sample size of tall players who try to play hockey is extremely small. You do have Zdeno Chara, Zadorov, Hall Gill etc. youth coach are optimizing the advantage of the height their get by developing goaltenders and Ds, that isn't a sign that you couldn't develop tall forwards that have all advantages just that there
is a limited supply of size. We should not conclude that a hockey version of Lebron can't exist because of that (Ovechkin-Malkin-Jagr-Lemieux-Lecavalier-Laine - Lindros are good indications).
If there was more taller-bigger players like this group, they would all play ahead of small players. (Obviously) They would always play ahead of a Martin St-Louis....Think about our Canadian Junior team in 2005...
I've recently come across a lot of data that shows these trends I've described.
Examples:
How has height changed over time in the NBA? | tothemean
NHL Player Size From 1917-18 to 2014-15: A Brief Look
Here you can see that height has been growing steady as a requirement in all leagues (NHL stopped growing heights as fast for now because of the emphasis for speed)
In hockey, when the game got faster, what changed is that the taller guys (see that the overall sizes didn't go down) started to build their bodies for more speed by cutting their weight gain (see the weight go down). Its evident to me that when the taller guys will be done with that process, their speed will go up, leaving less space for the smaller bodies to have a speed-agility advantage and slow incremental height gains will
then resume as everybody will be on a more level playing field for speed (goalies trends are the smoking gun) so height will become a differentiating advantage again. The reason that height is important at hockey, is simple math, the play surface is limited, therefore occupying more space on the ice, leads to a better D coverage. It probably helps with puck possession metrics as well. Height correlates with horizontal space coverage here, because of course vertical space coverage is less important at hockey than at Basketball.
There are overall risk that hockey is not growing their supply pool anymore (at least in Canada we are losing our supply pool), and that will have an effect on sizes, as talent will then become the only limiting factor.
What people don't get when they look at McCarron say, is that McCarron would never have even have a contract if he was 5'10'', his only attribute is size (glass half full), it's not the freaking glass half empty scenario. Small, slow, untalented is not something that has much of a chance. While tall, slow, untalented exist and can be useful. Small players absolutely need speed and/or talent as a minimum requirement, that's the proof that size matters.
