Odds of Getting In
Here's a quick recap of the math from the Salary section:
- Around 600 daily active players in the NHL, plus a few backups who don'’t dress.
- NCAA + CIS + AHL + KHL = around 5,600 players who'd love an NHL slot.
- If the NHL had to be completely re-staffed, each of the 5,600 guys still has less than an 11% chance of making the cut, and it doesn't need to be completely re-staffed.
Okay, fine, it's a long shot, but what about you personally? How badly do you want it? How talented are you? What latitude are you at? That last one probably matters the least, but hockey does tend to be more prevalent the farther north you go. This is kind of obvious if you think about it, what with the ice and all. If you grow up in New Mexico, for example, you will likely be intimately familiar with rocks, lizards, and second-degree sunburn, but the odds are against you seeing a lot of hockey. Up in Canada, on the other hand, we're not sure what else there is to do, so they play hockey. They won both the Men’s and Women's gold medals at the 2010 Olympics. And they also, um…they also, uh…dang. Well, we're sure they have other stuff up there. Restaurants or something.
Anyway, your drive and talent will dictate your odds. Say you are a person who has an innate athletic grace, decent skating ability, and also happens to have roughly the same physical dimensions as a Ford Escape. Your odds are better than most. Even if you can't handle the puck to save your life, there are always places on teams for enforcers.
On the other hand, let's say you stand 5'8" with skates on, and weigh in at 175 lbs. with all your pads. You better be really, really fast, or have really, really good stick handling skills, or a really, really hard slap shot.
You don't have to be huge to score (Ha!) a slot on a pro team. Size helps but skill matters more. Wayne Gretzky, considered to be the greatest hockey player of all time (we're not sure how else a person could get the nickname The Great One), stands all of 6'0" and weighs in at a whopping 185 lbs. One of the current top players in the world is Sidney Crosby, who is 5'11". Not exactly giants, those two, and yet they're both enormously successful hockey players. So size isn't the whole equation.