Average NHL Career Length (GP) between 1917/18 - 2005/06 Seasons

This section looks at the career length distribution of all NHL skaters between 1917/18 - 2005/06 seasons. Career length is defined here as the number of games played during the player's career. Career length measured in number of seasons is analyzed on a separate page. The data includes all goalies, forwards and defensemen who played their last regular season NHL game during or before the 2005/06 season.

On each chart, the horizontal axis (x-axis) shows the number of games played and the vertical axis (y-axis) the number of players. The red columns show the number of players in each GP group. Data labels have been added to the charts where they fit comfortably.

The tables below show summary statistics for the regular season data across player positions. Difference between the average career length of forwards and defense is only 10 games (roughly 5%). Goalies, on the other hand, have considerably shorter average careers. This is in contrast with the career length measured in number of seasons, where goalies, forwards and defense had almost identical career lengths.

The charts below show how career length - measured in number of games played - is distributed between all skaters (includes all forwards and defense) as well as forwards, defense and goalies separately.

Distribution are highly skewed to the left, which makes it difficult to see the shape of the distribution for players who have played more than 50 games during their careers. To overcome this problem the distributions for each position are broken down to two parts - Left Tail and Right Tail - which show the distribution for short careers (50 games or less) and long careers (over 50 games) respectively.

Click on the buttons below to move between the player positions or to switch between the full distribution and the tails.

Finally, the table below shows the percentage of NHL players who play different number of regular season games during their careers. For example, 40.68% of NHL defensemen and 51.47% of NHL goalies play between 1 and 50 games during their careers. The data in the table is also displayed in the chart below for forwards, defense and goalies.

The tables below show summary statistics for the playoffs data across player positions. Again, the differences between forwards and defense are very small, whereas the goalie careers are almost 50% shorter than the skater careers.

The charts below break down the length of playoff careers into 10 game intervals. Similarly to regular season charts, I have split the distributions in two to make the distribution shapes for both short (20 games or less) and long (over 20 games) careers more apparent.

If the majority of regular season careers are short, the same also seems to hold for the playoff careers. In fact, over 40% of skaters never dress up for a single post season contest and another 20% appear in less than 10 playoff games.

Click on the buttons below to move between the player positions or to switch between the full distribution and the tails.

The playoff distributions above have an interesting anomaly, where the number of skaters that played 2 games during their careers is considerably higher than the number of skaters who played only one game. This spike at two games is explained by the playoff system during 1920s and 1930s, where the series winner was commonly decided by an aggregate result of two games. In other words, a typical playoff series in those days consisted of only two games.

The table below shows the percentage of NHL players who play different number of playoff games during their careers. For example, only 44.02% of forwards never dress up for a single playoff game and another 19.03% play in less than 10 games. The data in the table is also displayed in the chart below for forwards, defense and goalies.

Career length is defined as the sum of regular season / playoff games played.

The data set does not include any players who have played in the league after 2005/06 season. They are excluded because we only want to include skaters whose NHL careers are over. There is no doubt that some skaters who haven't played in the league since 2005/06 will still return, but their number is likely to be sufficiently small not to obscure the analysis.

At present, skaters who have appeared in playoffs only are not included in the data set. This only affects the distribution for playoff career length.