Genetics is a huge one, you can't be a pro athlete without pro athlete genetics, and as more pro athletes are discovered the probability of finding one whose parents weren't or who is the first one in the line to roll those genetics gets lower. You also can't be a pro athlete without a culture that pushes you toward that particular sport and parents that support you being an athlete as opposed to say pushing you to be a doctor or something. You also can't be a pro hockey player without affording hockey. All these things matter a lot, most (including the genetics) are not optional.
The average middle class household in Canada makes $62k/year (total for the household). Tuition to a top hockey school costs $60k/year.It's a juvenile argument to suggest hockey is reserved for 'rich kids.' It is certainly not very accessible to poor kids (like many sports) but the middle class is quite obviously very well represented in hockey circles.
Weird, my wife and I are both teachers and our son plays high level club hockey. We certainly aren’t rich.
$80k?!?!?! Not even close.It may not be the case 100%.
And you are both teachers, likely pulling in $80K each or more, I'd consider that rich.
The average middle class household in Canada makes $62k/year (total for the household). Tuition to a top hockey school costs $60k/year.
I mean, I guess technically there is money left over...
This. Certainly there's some genetic advantage - studies related to other sports (mostly cycling) suggest that aerobic fitness (VO2 max) is about 50% heritable, the combination of slow-twitch (endurance) and fast-twitch (sprinting) muscle fibres is about 45% heritable, and strength and muscle mass is more than 50% heritable. So it's definitely not negligible.
But hockey (obviously) relies on a number of other attributes like agility and balance (which are apparently more "trainable" skills), not to mention the mental / or tactical aspect of the game.
I think it's mostly about environment in the case of these kids. They have the wealth and the opportunities; the right role-models, coaches and motivators (their own parents and their parent's circle); and probably a decent bit of name recognition and downright nepotism too.
Sam Gagner's dad played in the NHL for 15 years... bad example.Yeah nothing about a guy like Sam Ganger who is both small and slow screams genetic advantage.
He did have a refrigerated outdoor rink in his backyard so you could say that his biggest advantage was money.
Both play a factor. Are you kidding me?I really dislike this kind of nonsense.
We're not seeing more family dynasties in the sport because of superior genetics. We're seeing them because these players come from wealthy families and are getting better opportunities to succeed than almost everyone else.
Sam Gagner's dad played in the NHL for 15 years... bad example.
Agreed, but hockey is more widespread and more popular than ever. The number of NHL teams (and thus roster spots) have increased significantly since the early 1990s. Is there something different, or worthwhile examining, that changed recently and can explain the sharp increase in percentage of players who have a family connection?
Chalking this up to wealth alone seems awfully simple.
Both play a factor. Are you kidding me?
My buddy that I played hockey with used a thin blade on his stick because he wore it down from using it so much and couldn't afford to buy a new stick. I should have told him he was rich apparently because he played hockey.
The extent to which genetics is mentioned in hockey discourse, you'd think it was a major factor and there's simply no evidence for that.
I can inherit propensity for heart disease from my family. I cannot inherit brilliant hockey talent.
You're on to something very similar to what I was looking for in this thread:
Family relations as a measure of talent pool
At the end of the day, I didn't follow through with the project because I couldn't find a reasonable way to crunch the data for 100+ years of hockey. Key takeaways from the above which might be useful to you at some point:
- IMO, the percentage of the NHL which consists of siblings is a reasonable measure of the scale of the talent pool, for reasons described in detail above. Therefore, we can take the increase/decrease of siblings over time as a proxy for the progression/regression of the talent development system. From there, we can make further hypotheses about the general state of the game.
- Bear in mind that non-sibling family relations (dads, uncles, etc) open doors of opportunity in a way that is simply not quantifiable or escapable. This can undermine the process of identifying and developing true talent, but it can also produce additional high-performing players (both in terms of genetics and simply being very well coached), so it's really sticky to try and judge the cause-and-effect relationships.
- On the other hand, if you focus only on siblings, you can get a truer sense of how competitive the environment is for players raised in near-identical circumstances. A significant rise in the % of siblings in the league would suggest that certain families are almost "buying success" in the development system, because logically there is no reason why households should produce multiple NHL-level talents on anything approaching a routine basis, if the odds of making it are actually as remote as we usually presume they are.
Nobody's doing this. But ascribing athletic superiority to genetics is really bankrupt mentality, and aligns too closely with eugenics and various forms of scientific racism.