In the N.H.L., Short and Fast Sizes Up Well

Tampa Bay’s Martin St. Louis intercepts a Carolina pass in his own zone and in the same motion banks a perfect breakaway feed off the boards to Vincent Lecavalier, creating the goal that ends the Hurricanes’ postseason hopes and, in effect, puts the Rangers in the playoffs.

Montreal’s Brian Gionta scores both goals as the Canadiens steal their first-round series opener from the Bruins, 2-0, in Boston.

What do the principal characters in each of these pivotal N.H.L. moments of the last week and a half have in common? In a league where the average player is 6 feet 1 inch, they are short.

Gerbe is 5-5. St. Louis is 5-8. Gionta is 5-7.

Small N.H.L. players have undergone something of a revival since the 2004-5 lockout, when the league decided to strictly enforce rules against hooking, holding and other forms of obstruction, and legalized the long two-line pass.

One consequence of those changes was an increase in high-speed collisions and reported concussions. But a happier outcome was greater space and freedom to create, for players of all sizes.

“I probably wouldn’t have been drafted as high as I was if they hadn’t changed the rules,” Chicago’s Patrick Kane said at this year’s N.H.L. All-Star Game.

Kane, whose 5-10 official listing is probably exaggerated by an inch or two, was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2007 entry draft. He has become a Blackhawks star, status he cemented by scoring the Stanley Cup-winning goal in Game 6 in overtime last June.

“The rules changed, and it became a more offensive game,” Kane said. “Smaller guys are starting to play.”

Smaller players are making a bigger splash these days, it seems, but hockey has always had a place for less-than-gargantuan athletes. As Patrick Swayze said 25 years ago in the film “Youngblood,” a fictional account of junior hockey, “Thank God there’s a sport for middle-sized white boys.”

Hockey rosters are not as overwhelmingly white as they were in 1986. But many of them are still middle-size and small — even as athletes in sports like basketball, baseball and especially football have grown steadily larger.

Small players have starred in hockey since the 1920s heyday of Aurel Joliat and King Clancy, who at 5-7 were not really all that small for that era.

Ted Lindsay, at 5-8, scored and elbowed and brawled his way to 379 goals and 1,808 penalty minutes over 17 seasons. And no player has won more Stanley Cups than Henri Richard, the 5-7 Canadiens captain known as the Pocket Rocket, who won 11.

“It doesn’t matter what size a player is,” Richard said. “He can be any size, big or small, as long as he is not afraid. I was never afraid. That’s the thing I’ve always said if a player is small. If you’re not afraid, you can play anywhere.”

More recently, the 5-6 Theo Fleury scored 455 goals and won a Stanley Cup and gold medals in international play over a 15-season N.H.L. career.

Although the careers of current small stars like St. Louis, 35, and Gionta, 32, predate the lockout by several seasons, as do those of players like Scott Gomez, Steve Sullivan and Danny Briere, the list of smaller guys making a splash has indeed grown since 2005.

Gerbe shone in the Sabres’ stretch run in which they overtook the Hurricanes and the Rangers to secure the seventh playoff spot in the East, scoring six goals in seven games from March 13 to 26 before adding a two-goal performance in the clincher against Philadelphia on April 8.

Gerbe scored that spinning backhand goal moments after the Flyers’ Daniel Carcillo condescendingly patted him on the head.

“I’ve heard it since Day 1 in my life — I’ve lived with it, I’ve rolled with it,” Gerbe told reporters before the game. “There are a lot of small players in the league. I’m no different than anyone else.”

Brendan Shanahan, an N.H.L. vice president who helped formulate the rules as a player during the lockout, said he had seen the game change sharply since then.

“I’m just really pleased at the way N.H.L. players have reacted and responded to the new rules that promote skill and speed and entertainment,” Shanahan said.

“But also kids are excelling in the league now who were 13 or 14 years old when we came up with these new rules. You can see that in their development years they weren’t spending them with a guy 30 pounds heavier hooking and holding them and clutching and grabbing them. These young players coming into the game do things at such a high speed with so much skill, it’s nice to see it hasn’t just helped the N.H.L. — it’s also helped at the grass-roots level.”

Before the lockout, the N.H.L. had a long flirtation with supersizing. In the early 1990s, the league’s top line was the Flyers’ pile-driving Legion of Doom: Eric Lindros at 6-4, John LeClair at 6-3 and Mikael Renberg at 6-2.

The buzzword in those days was power forward, a term borrowed from basketball but meaning something quite different: a big, muscular center or wing who ran opponents into the boards or flattened them in open ice first, and scored goals later.

Mark Messier was the prototype, and Lindros was going to be the highest expression of size and skill. But all the emphasis on collision in the style of game Lindros played took its toll in a series of concussions that eventually forced him to retire.

Nowadays, height does not matter. But Rangers Coach John Tortorella scratched the 5-7 forward Mats Zuccarello for Friday’s Game 2 of their series with Washington because he was “not sure” that Zuccarello could handle “the size and overall consistency of playoff hockey.”

Tortorella said he would not rule out returning to Zuccarello. This season, Tortorella likened Zuccarello to St. Louis, whom he coached when Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup in 2004.

“I don’t differentiate from playing before and playing now,” Tortorella said of the rule changes. “It’s just hard to get to those small guys, especially with the quickness that both of them have.”

He continued, sounding much the same theme as Richard.

“The two that I have had, St. Louis and Zucc, they’re not afraid anyway,” Tortorella said. “The guy in Tampa, he had the heart of a lion.”