Outliers

Those of you who have read Malcolm Gladwell's latest bestseller, Outliers, will remember the passage at the beginning of the books where he shows that a disproportionate number of all-star junior hockey players are born in the first months of the year. Gladwell attributes this to the fact that slightly older players have a slight size advantage as children and are therefore more likely to get into competitive leagues with better coaches and more hours of practice.

This seems like a truly astonishing statistic, but it's also slightly misleading. While it's true that an overwhelming proportion of top junior hockey players are born in the first months of the year, this is not the case at the top of the NHL. This year, for instance, the top three scorers in the NHL were born respectively in July, August and September. Wayne Gretzky was born on January 21st but Mario Lemieux was born on October 5fth. Really, among the top, top players, among the best of the best, there doesn't seem to be any clustering of brithdates.

Gladwell's book is about Outliers, so it's a little bit misleading for him to study junior hockey players -who aren't really outliers- rather than NHL stars.