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Lane Hutson and the size problem

Every scout said he was too small. I checked whether they were right.

September 19, 2026 · Keith Wilcox

Lane Hutson showed up to the 2022 draft at 5'8" and 158 pounds. He was putting up numbers nobody his age was putting up, and he still sat there until pick 62. The average defenseman drafted this century is 6'2", 198. Teams have been paying up for that build since before Hutson was born.

Four years later my draft model has that pick at +0.66, which is steal territory, and he's only four years into a twelve year window. So he worked out. Fine. One guy working out doesn't prove anything, though. Every draft has a late pick who pans out.

What I actually wanted to know: is "too small" a real scouting read, or is it a bad habit that teams keep paying for? That's two separate questions, and you need both to call something a market mistake:

  1. Do teams draft you higher for being big?
  2. Once you know where a guy got picked, does being big tell you anything about how he turns out?

If the answer is yes to the first and no to the second, teams are paying for something that doesn't deliver. And if that's true, small defensemen shouldn't just be fun exceptions. They should beat their draft slot as a group.

What I'm working with: every defenseman drafted from 2000 to 2026, 2,026 of them, with height and weight from draft day on 99.9%. Outcomes come from my draft value model, which scores each pick against what that slot normally produces. No junior stats here, just measurables against careers.

2026 drafted defensemen 2000-2026, 1159 in the mature window
average drafted D: 73.8" , 198 lbs

The guys everyone brings up

Before any of the real analysis, here's the short defenseman hall of fame and what my model thinks of each pick. Keep an eye on the last row.

draftyear overallpick player_name height weight gp actual_value expected_value score maturity_years
719 2008 156 Jared Spurgeon 69 185 1012.0 7.6473 0.5619 0.7694 12
975 2012 78 Shayne Gostisbehere 71 160 744.0 8.3106 0.9716 0.7138 12
1683 2022 62 Lane Hutson 68 158 166.0 2.7802 0.1706 0.6605 4
779 2009 106 Sami Vatanen 69 163 473.0 5.4301 0.8103 0.6381 12
1389 2018 7 Quinn Hughes 69 173 507.0 9.4235 4.2504 0.3525 8
1310 2017 4 Cale Makar 71 187 470.0 9.5325 5.2942 0.2678 9
1822 2024 43 Cole Hutson 71 165 14.0 0.1951 0.0188 0.1452 2

That table is basically the whole argument in miniature.

Jared Spurgeon went 156th at 5'9" and played over a thousand NHL games. He grades out at +0.77. Quinn Hughes (5'9", 7th) and Cale Makar (5'11", 4th) both come back positive, which is wild when you think about it, because picks that high are already expected to produce stars. Even when a team holds its nose and takes a small guy early, it's worked.

Lane Hutson is at +0.66, and he's done that in four years while everyone else on the list had twelve. And then there's his younger brother Cole, who went 43rd to Washington in 2024 at 5'11", 165 pounds, and is already positive at +0.15 two years in. Two brothers, same knock on both of them, two years apart.

Cool. That's the anecdote pile. Now let's do it properly.

First question: does size get you drafted higher?

I took the defensemen from 2000 through 2014, so 1,159 guys whose careers are basically done, sorted them into height buckets, and looked at where each bucket went in the draft.

n avg_pick pct_first_round
hbucket
<=5'10" 43 139.9 7.0
5'11"-6'0" 230 128.2 9.6
6'1"-6'2" 475 129.9 9.9
6'3"-6'4" 333 120.7 14.7
6'5"+ 78 100.5 21.8

No surprise here. Guys 6'5" and up went in the first round 21.8% of the time and came off the board around pick 100 on average. The 5'10" and under crowd made the first round 7% of the time and waited until pick 140.

So yes, size gets you drafted higher. That's half of it. Now the part that matters.

Second question: did teams get what they paid for?

This is where the draft value score does the work, because it already compares every player to what his slot normally returns. If teams were pricing size right, every height bucket should land near zero. A bucket that's clearly positive means teams were getting a discount they didn't realize they were getting.

              n  mean_score  steal_pct  made_nhl_pct  mean_value
hbucket                                                         
<=5'10"      43       0.025     23.256        41.860       2.116
5'11"-6'0"  230      -0.135     15.217        30.870       1.563
6'1"-6'2"   475      -0.215      8.000        22.526       0.971
6'3"-6'4"   333      -0.210      6.607        27.628       1.196
6'5"+        78      -0.227      5.128        29.487       1.268
Chart: Second question: did teams get what they paid for

The results run backwards from what everybody believes.

The shortest bucket is the only one above zero (+0.03). Everything six foot and up sits around −0.21. Short defensemen who got drafted turned into steals 23% of the time. For the 6'5"+ guys it's 5%. The short guys even reached 100 NHL games more often, 42% against 29%.

Teams were paying extra for the body type with the worst returns on the board.

Running it as an actual regression

Bucket tables can hide stuff, so I ran both questions as regressions on the same group:

  • What teams pay for: draft slot from height and weight.
  • What actually predicts a career: career value from draft slot, height and weight. The slot already has everything scouts knew baked into it, size included. So if height still adds anything here, that's information teams had and didn't use.
MARKET:  log(pick) ~ height + weight
         Coef.  Std.Err.       t   P>|t|  [0.025  0.975]
const   7.4818    1.1025  6.7865  0.0000  5.3188  9.6449
height -0.0217    0.0172 -1.2599  0.2079 -0.0555  0.0121
weight -0.0068    0.0020 -3.3535  0.0008 -0.0108 -0.0028

OUTCOME: career value ~ log(pick) + height + weight
           Coef.  Std.Err.        t   P>|t|   [0.025   0.975]
const    21.1066    2.4944   8.4614  0.0000  16.2125  26.0008
logpick  -1.3397    0.0653 -20.5292  0.0000  -1.4678  -1.2117
height   -0.2200    0.0382  -5.7532  0.0000  -0.2951  -0.1450
weight    0.0122    0.0045   2.7060  0.0069   0.0034   0.0211

Two things came out of this that I didn't expect.

One, it's weight teams are really paying for, not height. The two go together obviously, but when you split them, mass is what moves a draft board.

Two, height isn't just useless once you know the draft slot. It's negative and it's not close: about −0.22 of career value per inch, p < 0.0001. Take any pick in the draft, and historically the shorter defenseman there gave you more.

That sounds insane until you think about how a small guy gets drafted at all. He has to be so obviously good that a team drafts him anyway. So at any given pick, the short guy is usually the better player, because he had to clear a higher bar to get there. The discount is what creates the bargain. Same thing Moneyball found with walks.

Do you have to be a scorer to be small in this league?

You hear this one a lot, and it makes sense: small works if you're Hutson or Hughes, and it doesn't work for anybody else. So I tested it. I took the defensemen who actually made it, 200 games or more, split them by height, and looked at their scoring against the median NHL defenseman.

median D points/game among 200+ GP survivors: 0.271

            survivors  pct_offense_first  avg_ppg
hbucket                                          
<=5'10"            15              80.00     0.40
5'11"-6'0"         56              75.00     0.38
6'1"-6'2"          83              42.17     0.28
6'3"-6'4"          80              38.75     0.27
6'5"+              20              35.00     0.28

survival rate (200+ GP): short D 35% vs tall D 24%

Yep, that one's real. 80% of the short guys who made it are above the median in scoring, averaging 0.40 points a game, which is top pair production. For the 6'5"+ group it's 35%. And the short guys made it more often to begin with, 35% against 24%.

So the rule isn't "size doesn't matter." The rule is that being a great offensive player is the only way a small defenseman gets a real look. Nobody is drafting a 5'9" shutdown guy. A 5'9" guy who can move the puck gets drafted, just later than he should. Spurgeon, Hughes and Hutson don't prove size is meaningless. They prove the discount on small puck movers was way too big.

Are teams figuring it out?

Makar went 4th in 2017, Hughes 7th in 2018. So I checked whether anything changed after that. Short defensemen (5'11" and under) were 6% of the top 62 defensemen taken from 2000 to 2007, 10% from 2008 to 2015, and 21.8% since 2016.

That's a real correction, and it's speeding up. But Hutson still fell to 62 in 2022. My read is that teams got comfortable with 5'10" or 5'11" and are still nervous about anything under that. The line moved down an inch, and the value moved down with it.

Chart: Are teams figuring it out

Stuff this doesn't cover

Being straight about the holes:

  • No junior numbers. This is measurables against careers, nothing else. The better version of this would translate junior scoring across leagues, and I don't have that data loaded yet.
  • Kids grow. Height and weight here are from age 17 or 18. Plenty of guys add an inch and 25 pounds after that. Draft day weight is especially sketchy.
  • My value number leans offensive. It sees scoring better than defense, so it probably undersells big shutdown guys. Whenever I get a WAR style number built, that's the real test of this.
  • Hutson isn't finished. He's four years into twelve. His score moves every summer as the bar for his slot goes up.
  • Survivor bias. The 200 game cut only looks at guys who made it. The players this bias really hurt are the ones who never got a shot, and they're invisible here by definition.

What I want to look at next

  • Is this a defenseman thing or does it happen with forwards too? Same tests, different position.
  • Height or weight, which one is the worse thing to pay for once you separate them?
  • Every short defenseman taken in the top 40 since 2000. How many hit, how many didn't.
  • And Cole Hutson. Teams got a second crack at a Hutson and still let him go 43rd. I'll be checking that one every summer.
Built from the notebook 03_hutson_size_bias.ipynb. The models behind it live on this site: shot maps and expected goals on player pages, draft value on the draft tab.
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