Some of you already know this, but I enjoy distributions, and I think they get sorely under-used in analysis (although, in the end, they are the basis of predictive work). This piece is a bit old (the data is across all skaters, 2007-08 through 2011-12, n = 3,334), but it shows the number of skaters with 200+ minutes of 5v5 time at each age grouping. The peak is clearly at 24 or 25 among this group, but we should be clear with what “peak” means. Although even-strength time can be a pretty good indicator of overall player talent, it’s still a shaky signal (c’mon, we know not all coaches put the “right” guys out there sometimes). Further, powerplay time can sometimes be a drag on better players’ energy for even-strength time, which can also compromise this signal. Nevertheless, if you were to sort all players into even-strength time groupings (say, forwards in 4 groups by ESTOI, and defensemen in 3 groups by ESTOI) you’d see that the top would generally perform better possession and offense-wise than the second, and so on down.

With that in mind, “peak” is also about health. Though we’ve not had much research into it (hint, hint), we have reason to suspect that injuries might drag on possession measures a bit. That said, 24-25 can also be a performance peak for the reason that players are less likely to have major injuries until that age or later.

I plan on digging into this data again (now that I have my ES data back to 1997-98) and splitting into forward and defense groups, but this is a good start.