How Much Lighter Did the NHL Really Get?

On paper, skaters peaked at 206.4 pounds in 2003-04

Gaudreau’s 137 went into the books because somebody wrote it down. Every NHL weight got there the same way. Read those listings at face value and skaters got heavier for 80 years, peaked in the early 2000s and have been slimming down since. Correct them, and skaters still got lighter, by less, until about 2019, then gained some of it back.

The average NHL skater in 2025-26 is listed at 201.5 pounds and 73.4 inches, a shade over 6-foot-1 and a bit over 200. In that average each player counts once for every game he played, so a regular counts more than a call-up. On the listings, the heaviest season was 2003-04, at 206.4 lb, and 2005-06 was close behind at 205.9. In the 1920s the same average was about 170.

Both lines climb for 80 years: slowly to about 1960, then fast. Listed weight rose 21 lb from 1960-61 to 1990-91, while height rose 1.7 inches. The climb stopped around 2000. The top was flat: every season from 1997-98 to 2010-11 is listed within about a pound of 2003-04. Corrected, 2003-04 is still the heaviest season, at 203.1 lb on our main correction (the version we use in the charts), and it stays on top however we correct. The corrected line sits 3.2 lb under the listed one in 2005-06 and meets it in 2025-26, where the listings are current.

The NHL lists Jagr at 230 in his rookie season

The first catch is how the league keeps those numbers. The NHL’s official stats carry one height and one weight for each player, and repeat them in every season he played. We went through all 7,897 of its skaters, season by season, 39,747 seasons in all after each man’s first. Not one weight or height ever changes. For active players that weight is current. For retired players it is the last one the league listed. Jaromir Jagr shows as 230 lb in his 1990-91 rookie season, when he was 18.

Take 2005-06. The average skater that season was 28.5 years old, but the weight counted for him was the one listed when he was about 34. Before 2015-16 that gap is about three to eight years in every season. It closes only in the last few seasons, because today’s players have not finished their careers.

Those years matter because players fill out. Morgan Rielly was listed at 200 pounds at the 2012 draft, at 18. The NHL lists him at 224 today. Across the league, skaters from the 2009-19 drafts who reached the NHL weigh about 13 lb more now (or when they retired) than on draft day. To see when they add it, we compared players from the same draft who were last listed at different ages. At 28, players are still adding almost a pound a year. In the 30s it slows: about 4 lb in all from 28 to 34. So an early season counted at a late-career weight is counted too heavy. To correct it, we took the gap between a player’s age that season and his age when he was listed, and took off the weight a player usually gains over those years.

A weight changes when a team decides to change it

Even that one weight can move. On Jan. 17, 2016, new weights turned up on the Maple Leafs’ official roster. “Leafs updated their players’ weights on official roster,” James Mirtle wrote on Twitter that day, as quoted by the fan site Pension Plan Puppets. “Basically everyone got heavier, including some by a lot.” The site lined the numbers up. The team average went from 200.29 to 204.96 pounds. Morgan Rielly went from 205 to 217, and James van Riemsdyk from 200 to 217. “We don’t know if some of the old numbers were just out of date or not,” the site wrote. The NHL’s stats now list Rielly at 224 and van Riemsdyk at 210.

Matt Rempe of the Rangers has been listed at three weights since early 2024. NHL.com called him “a towering presence listed at 6-foot-7 and 241 pounds” on the day of his debut in February 2024. The Rangers’ release on his new contract in June 2025 said “The 6-9, 255-pound forward.” The NHL’s stats now say 268. His draft record, from 2020 at age 18, says 207.

Gaudreau’s own number kept moving too. In 2016 Sports Illustrated gave him “the league’s lightest frame, a whopping 157 pounds.” His last NHL listing, from 2023-24 with Columbus, is 163 pounds at 5-foot-9. Gaudreau and his brother Matthew were struck by a car and killed while riding bicycles in Salem County, New Jersey, in August 2024. In its tribute, NHL.com wrote that of the 1,022 players who appeared in the league in 2023-24, “Only five were lighter.” The NHL’s stats count the same 1,022 players today, and only three of them are listed under 163. Five lighter men in August 2024, three today, from the same list of players: most likely some of those weights were rewritten in between.

Corrected, skaters got lighter until 2019, then gained some of it back

Take the extra weight off the old seasons, and NHL skaters still got lighter, until about 2019. From 2005-06 to 2019-20 they lost four to five pounds, in every way we corrected it. Then they gained some of it back. On our main correction, today’s skaters are about a pound lighter than those of 2005-06. Depending on how we correct, the answer runs from 0 to 3.9 pounds lighter, and a range that starts at 0 means possibly no change at all. The listings, by contrast, say 4.4 pounds lighter.

Today’s answer is a range because the correction assumes that players of every era put on weight with age the way the 2009-19 draft classes did, and nobody can check that for a player listed once. So we made the guess seven ways. Some let players keep gaining into their 30s. Others stop the gain at 28 or at 25. In the chart, the pale area around the corrected line covers all seven, from the lowest to the highest.

Read the corrected line and the slimming down came mostly between 2010-11 and 2017-18: 201.6 lb to 198.2. The listed line shows the same fall over the same years. After 2019-20 they part. The listed line is flat, while every corrected line rises. If players stop gaining weight at 25, the rise is about a pound. If we build the correction only from players drafted in even-numbered years, it is about four. Which is right depends on how much weight players put on in their late 20s, and a single listing cannot show that.

Why do the seven versions agree on 2019 and split on today? Players from 2005-06 and from 2019-20 were both listed years later, by about the same number of years. So whatever a version takes off one season, it takes off about the same from the other, and the drop between them stays at four to five pounds. Players from 2025-26 are listed at what they weigh now, so nothing comes off. That makes the gap from 2005-06 to today depend on how much a version takes off 2005-06, and the versions disagree on that.

Draft day tells the same story, pucks and all

Draft records give a second check, because every pick is listed at about the same age, 18. There are two catches. The first is Gaudreau’s: the weights were reported by teams and scouts, and a 17-year-old with five pucks in his jock strap could move one. The second is that for picks who reached the NHL, older draft records were often overwritten with a later NHL weight. In the 2000 draft, 77% of the skaters who reached the NHL have a draft-day weight that matches their NHL listing exactly. In 2005 it is 45%. By 2011 it is 3%, and the 2011 picks who made it are listed about 13 pounds heavier today than their draft records say. Sidney Crosby’s 2005 draft entry says 200 lb, close to his NHL listing of 206 and not a 17-year-old’s weight. So the clean comparisons are picks who never played in the NHL, from any draft, and NHL picks from about 2009 on.

The never-made-it picks were heaviest in the mid-2000s (196.5 lb in 2005) and lightest around 2018-20, 15 to 18 lb lower, and they have gained some of it back since. Each year is about 75 to 190 players, so single years swing by several pounds. Averaging three drafts at a time smooths that out: 194 lb for the 2003-05 drafts, 183 for 2017-19 and 189 for 2023-25. Picks who did reach the NHL from the 2009-19 drafts weighed 187.4 lb on draft day and 12.6 lb more later on average. Teams drafted lighter teenagers, and those teenagers filled out.

Even the league’s two sources disagree on one teenager. Montreal took Lane Hutson 62nd in 2022. The draft records list him at 158 pounds and 5-foot-8. An NHL.com feature by Stan Fischler says that on draft day “he was a lighter-than-NHL-average 5-foot-9, 162 pounds.” The capsule scouting report on him, Fischler wrote, was “Too small and too light.” Gaudreau heard the same thing for years. “He shouldn’t be in this league at that height and weight,” Brian Burke, then Calgary’s president, told SI in 2016.

The heaviest season belonged to a scorer listed at 180 pounds

The drop shows at the ends of the lineup, and the heaviest season makes the point with one player. In 2003-04, the heaviest season on the listings, the scoring title went to the lightest of the league’s ten top scorers. Martin St. Louis, undrafted and listed at 180 pounds and 5-foot-8, scored 94 points for Tampa Bay. He won the Art Ross and the Hart, and his “24 points in 23 playoff games helped the Lightning win the franchise’s first Stanley Cup championship,” as the Hockey Hall of Fame puts it. The concerns about him, the Hall says, “came down to his height.” The next lightest of the ten were Patrik Elias at 190 and Markus Naslund at 191. Joe Sakic and Ilya Kovalchuk, tied for second with 87 points, were listed at 195 and 222.

Around him, the league was big. On the listings, skaters of 220 lb or more played 21.7% of games in 2003-04 and 12.8% in 2025-26. Skaters under 190 lb went from 11.1% to 23.1%. Most of the change happened at the two ends of the lineup.

Corrected, the 2025-26 shares look like 2005-06 again. Skaters under 190 played 22.0% of games then and 23.1% now. Height barely moved through all of it (73.2 inches in 2005-06, 73.4 now), so the change is weight at the same height. Every season since 2000-01 has averaged between 73.1 and 73.4 inches. Small forwards, listed 5-foot-9 or shorter, played 3.0% of forward games in 2005-06 and 4.4% in 2025-26. In 2025-26 they scored 4.2% of forward points. Few forwards that small make it. The ones who do can still lead the league: in 2025-26 Nikita Kucherov, listed at 172, scored 130 points, second in the league.

Why teams turned to lighter players, season averages cannot say. Sports Illustrated’s 2016 Gaudreau feature offered one view, from Calgary general manager Brad Treliving: that Gaudreau stood for “an evolving NHL where stricter obstruction rules let players like Gaudreau showcase their talents, regardless of size.” Obstruction is the hooking, holding and interference a big defenceman uses to slow a small forward. The feature does not say when that changed. The league’s big package of rule changes came in 2005-06, and among other things it dropped the old ban on passes across two lines. But most of the drop in weight came years later, after 2010-11. If the new rules had an effect, it was slow to arrive.

The heaviest regulars did not get lighter as the average fell

Those shares count everyone over 220 pounds or under 190. The single heaviest regular of each decade did not follow the average down.

The heaviest regular did not get lighter as the average fell: from 240 lb in the 1980s to 265 in the 2000s and 2010s and 268 in the 2020s, Rempe’s current listing. The lightest regulars have stayed between about 155 and 165 lb since the 1970s.

On the listings, defencemen slimmed the most, and the lightest regular now plays defence

The drop was not the same at every position. On the listings, defencemen went from 212.1 lb in 2003-04 to 205.7 in 2025-26 and forwards from 203.5 to 199.4. So the slimming down was a skater story. Goalies went the other way. They grew taller in this period (see The Goalie Who Grew Five Inches) and got heavier: 196.5 lb in 2003-04 and 202.6 now, about as heavy as the average skater.

Height is the check on all of this. It did not swing the way weight did, so the slimming down happened at the same height. Defencemen have stood about an inch taller than forwards since 1980 (1.0 inches in 2025-26). The gap was narrowest in the 1960s, at about 0.6 of an inch, and wider in the 1940s and 1950s. Height is listed once per player too, but grown men don’t get taller, so the old height listings are close to right.

The lightest regular in the league is a defenceman. Of every skater who played 40 or more games in 2025-26, Hutson has the lightest listing, 162 pounds at 5-foot-9. He played all 82 games for Montreal, about 24 minutes a night, and scored 78 points. He won the Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie the season before. “He hasn’t been too small, nor too light,” Fischler wrote.

Around 1990, heavier teams stopped finishing higher

Getting lighter would only cost a team if weight helped it win. One sweep could be a fluke, so we went back to every team since 1967-68 and asked when a heavy roster stopped meaning a high finish. The answer is around 1990, two decades before skaters got lighter. We checked it in three steps.

1. For every team since 1967-68, we averaged its skaters’ weights, counting each player once per game he played and correcting for listing age.
2. We compared each team with the league average that season, so a team is “heavy” only next to its rivals.
3. Then we lined that up against the share of the available standings points the team won (2 for a win, 1 for a tie or an overtime or shootout loss).

From 1967-68 to 1989-90, heavier teams tended to finish a few points higher. A typical heavy team of that era, about 3 pounds a man above the league, got about 6 more points over 82 games. Teams were never far apart. The widest gap was Boston in 1970-71, 9.4 pounds a man heavier, and all but 25 of the era’s 416 team seasons were within 5 pounds of the league. Stretch the pattern to a team 10 pounds a man heavier and it comes to about 23 points, but no team of that era got that far. To check the pattern was not a fluke of a few years, we split the seasons into two piles, odd-numbered and even-numbered, and it showed up in both.

From 1990-91 on, we could not detect it. From 1990-91 to 2003-04, and again since 2005-06, ten extra pounds a man went with about 2 points, too few to tell apart from no link at all. Since 2005-06 the two piles of seasons don’t agree on even that.

The bars run from 0, where a team’s weight has nothing to do with where it finished, to 1, where you could sort teams by weight and get the standings. In 1967-90, across 416 team seasons, the first bar comes to about 0.31. That is a modest link: the few points a season described above. From 1990-91 to 2003-04 (372 team seasons) it is 0.05, and since 2005-06 (644) it is 0.04, close enough to zero that luck alone could produce it.

How sure are we? The old link is probably real. Even if bounces and luck flattered it, our luck check puts its low end around 0.23, above zero. The two later eras are small enough that luck alone could explain them. We are less sure of the old link’s size than 416 seasons makes it sound, because the same teams, often with the same players, turn up season after season. The numbers show that heavy teams and high finishes went together in the old era. They do not show that the weight won the games.

Part of the old link is the listing quirk again. In the 1970s and 1980s, players on good teams had longer careers. A longer career meant a later listing, at an older and heavier age, so good teams look heavier on paper than they were. Our correction takes out age, but not career length. On the raw listings, with no correction at all, the old link looks even stronger, at 0.38. When we also allowed for how many years after the season each team’s players were listed, it fell from 0.31 to 0.14. More than half of it went away. The rest still cleared zero on our luck check, though that check treats each team season as separate.

Height gives one more check, because grown men do not get taller. Taller teams also finished higher before 1990 (0.36 on the same scale) and stopped doing so after (−0.04, then 0.03). Allowing for longer careers cuts the old height link roughly in half, to 0.19. The check may go too far. Good teams keep their players longer, so allowing for long careers may also strip out some of the real link.

The Cup followed the same timeline

The Cup is the bluntest test of whether weight won, and it follows the same timeline, with a warning attached. From 1967-68 to 1989-90, 18 of 23 champions came from the heavier half of the league on the corrected count. On the raw listings it was 20. A fair coin would give 18 or more about one time in 190. But those are not 23 separate tries. Montreal won nine of those Cups, Edmonton five and the Islanders four, often with the same players, so one heavy dynasty counts several times. From 1990-91 to 2003-04, 7 of 14 champions came from the heavier half. Since 2005-06 it is 10 of 21. Both are about what a coin flip gives. In the Final itself, the heavier team won 17 of 23 in the old era, 8 of 14 from 1990-91 to 2003-04 and 9 of 21 since 2005.

The 1987-88 Oilers fit the old pattern. They were the heaviest team in the league on both counts, with Wayne Gretzky listed at 185. Since 1990, champions have come in every size. Martin St. Louis and the 2003-04 Lightning won as the 5th-heaviest of 30 teams on the corrected count. The last three champions, Florida twice and Carolina, ranked 24th to 27th of 32. Carolina’s 2025-26 team, 25th, had Logan Stankoven at 165 and Nikolaj Ehlers at 168.

Put the two timelines side by side. Heavy teams stopped finishing higher around 1990. The league’s skaters got lighter after 2010, two decades later. These numbers cannot show that size ever won games, or that it stopped mattering.

The weights are soft, but the 2005-to-2019 drop holds

Every weight in this story started with somebody writing it down. Here is what could be off, and which findings survive it.

• Teams write the weights down. Nobody audits them, and a team may update one every year or never. If teams across the league changed how they list weights, it would look like a change in bodies.
• Single listings move, and some were fudged. Gaudreau’s 137 was made with pucks. The Leafs added almost five pounds a man in one roster update in 2016. Rempe has been listed at three weights since early 2024. The draft records say Hutson weighed 158 on draft day, and an NHL.com feature says 162. We can’t tell how often teams re-list players across the league, or in which direction.
• The correction is an educated guess. It takes the weight that 2009-19 draftees gained as they aged and applies it to every era. Players of the 1960s, or of the 1990s, may have filled out differently. Fewer than 100 players in that group were listed past 32, so the guess is thinnest there. The pale band in the chart shows how far our seven versions spread. We also rebuilt the main version a thousand times, each time from a random redraw of the same 1,080 players, and 19 times in 20 it put today’s skaters between about 0.6 and 2.1 lb lighter than in 2005-06. That only tests the main version. The 0-to-3.9 range across all seven is the safer answer. If earlier players gained more with age than today’s, the gap could be gone.
• The 2005-to-2019 drop is the sturdy part. Players from 2005-06 were listed about five and a half years later on average, and players from 2019-20 about four and a half. Any version of the correction takes a similar amount off both, so the drop between them barely moves.

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• Players who last are not typical. The men still playing at 34 are the ones who survived, so the weight gain from 28 to 34 could say as much about who sticks around as about how bodies change. Stopping the gain at 25 or 28 is our check on that, and the 2005-to-2019 drop holds there too.
• This is every game. Every skater game since 1917-18 counts, so nothing hangs on which games we picked. The doubt is all in the listings.
• The team finding shows things going together, and part of it is the listing quirk. Good teams’ players lasted longer and so were listed later. Allowing for that cuts the 1967-90 weight link by more than half (0.31 to 0.14), and height, which barely moves with age, shows the same before-and-after pattern. Players traded during a season are left out of team averages. A dynasty’s Cups are not separate tries. Season averages can’t say why teams chose lighter players, or whether weight ever helped.
• Timing is not cause. The decline came after the 2005-06 rule changes, which among other things allowed passes across two lines, but most of it came after 2010-11.

The lightest regular plays about 24 minutes a night

In 2003-04, the heaviest season in the NHL’s books, the league’s top scorer was an undrafted winger listed at 180 pounds. In 2025-26, Martin St. Louis was coaching Montreal. His defenceman Lane Hutson is listed at 162, a pound under Gaudreau’s last listing. He played almost 24 minutes a night.

Show the work

Tests written down

Not in advance (exploratory)

Results computed

October 26, 2026

Every NHL regular season 1917-18 to 2025-26 (2004-05 cancelled), skaters weighted by games played, goalies shown separately. Each player has one listed weight. The correction subtracts the expected weight gain between a player's age that season and his age when last listed, from a draft-day-to-listing curve fitted on 1,080 NHL skaters from the 2009-19 drafts with draft-class effects. Seven versions of the correction give the range. Team section (computed 2026-10-27): for every team-season since 1967-68, the games-weighted listed and corrected (main curve) weight and listed height of skaters who played for only that team that season, teams with more than 300 such games, each measured against that season's league; points % from the NHL's game results (2 for a win, 1 for a tie or an overtime or shootout loss). Correlations are pooled over the team-seasons of each era, with 90% ranges by Fisher's z, which treat team-seasons as independent. Odd and even seasons are the split-half check. "Listing lag held fixed" is the partial correlation given the team's average gap between each player's age that season and his age when listed. Cup winner = winner of the last playoff game of the season.

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Keep reading

• How Hockey Changed: NHL data stories →One chart-led story a day about how the NHL game, its players and its rules have changed.
• The goalie who grew five inches →NHL goalies went from 5-foot-10 to 6-foot-3, and skaters barely grew.
• Does skating speed win games? →A lineup speed rating tested against expected goals, wins and closing odds.
• NHL player pages →Every current player: stats, lines, ice time and form.

Sources and method

1. NHL stats (NHL.com), every season since 1917-18
2. NHL stats API: skater and goalie bios (height, weight, birth date), every season since 1917-18
3. NHL stats API: skater season totals (team, games, points, ice time) and game results, regular season and playoffs
4. NHL Records: draft history with height and weight for every pick since 1963
5. Scouting the Refs: NHL historical rule changes
6. Sports Illustrated, Alex Prewitt: The Big Short: Pint-sized Johnny Gaudreau delivers thrills (March 2016)
7. NHL.com, Nicholas J. Cotsonika: Gaudreau will be remembered as small forward who left huge legacy (Aug. 30, 2024)
8. Pension Plan Puppets, Cathy Squires: Updated Maple Leafs roster shows some big gains (Jan. 22, 2016)
9. NHL.com, Dan Rosen: Matt Rempe’s NHL debut at the Stadium Series (Feb. 18, 2024)
10. New York Rangers: Rangers agree to terms with Matt Rempe (June 18, 2025)
11. Hockey Hall of Fame: Martin St. Louis, 2018 induction
12. Montreal Canadiens: Martin St. Louis appointed interim head coach (Feb. 9, 2022)
13. Montreal Canadiens: Canadiens exercise two-year option on Martin St-Louis’ contract (April 17, 2024)
14. NHL.com, Taylor Baird: Canadiens at Stars recap, with Montreal coach Martin St. Louis (Jan. 4, 2026)
15. NHL.com, Stan Fischler: Hutson transforming Canadiens after overcoming “too small, too light” scouting report (Oct. 15, 2025)
16. NHL.com: This date in NHL history, June 7 (Detroit completes the 1997 sweep)
17. NHL API reference (community documentation of the stats endpoints)

Research and analysis, not betting advice. Past results do not guarantee future returns; bet only what you can afford to lose.