When we watch hockey coverage we hear a common mantra around player size. “They’re too small” or “Just park him in front of the net”. But what does this mean for the league and the composition of its player base?

I believe that in order to see if there is any discernible difference between teams of beef cakes and slim jims; we must quantify and then analyze the results. To do this I have created the SMJHL’s “Defensity” statistic, which refers to the density of defencemen across the league.
To do this, I took the heights and weights of all defensemen currently rostered and divided their weight by height to get a largely meaningless stat which we can use to judge the thickness of a team, and then compare that against their place in the standings.
Before getting into the team-wide statistics I would like to first start with the Defensity honourable mentions. Those that are above and or beyond those of their peers, here we differentiate betweens the thick and the slick.

Here are the top three in Defensity: 1 - Kermit Zhaba of the Ottawa Highlanders with a 3.66. And with a tie for second we have Dog Jagr and Big Sweg with a 3.61.
Our Bottom three are the following: Oceane Soderberg-Tremblay of the Yukon Malamutes with a 1.89, Ben Crawley of the ThunderBay Walleye with a 2.08, and Johanna Krakow of the Ottawa Highlanders with a 2.25.

Now when we look at the whole league in Figure 1, we see a few outliers. For one, Yukon has a much lower Defensity rating than the rest of the league, yet seems to be outperforming many of the larger teams, with the highest Defensity teams also generally ranking lower in the standings with St Louis and Detroit having 2 of the 3 highest scores with a 3.14 and 2.92 respectively. It seems our data is clumped at a Defensity of ~2.85 where within a +/- of 0.05 we see nine of our teams situated.

To see if there was much of a difference we then compared the Highest ranked team in standings with the lowest team in standings by their teams defensive makeups. Looking at Figure 2: Anchorage, we see 9 defensemen, with a great range of Defensity scores with 2 scores surpassing 3 and the majority hovering around ~2.7. Compared to Figure 3: Detroit we see 6 defensemen with scores roughly around ~2.8 except for Vasher Summers at 3.382.
Ultimately it seems there is currently little correlation between the Defensity metric and team success, especially at a point so early into the season. While I expect there could be some utility later on as the season goes, this is unlikely to give anything besides context which can then be paired with other stats such as +/- or Pk%. So for now we can just consider Defensity as a quick way to look at how size can be compared to a teams standings.

Approved @Glyc