How many players in the top 10 of last June’s draft were born in January? Wondering who thinks it matters? Read on.

Fifteen years ago I talked to Malcolm Gladwell on the phone. We have a mutual friend or two. He was just establishing his place in the New Yorker’s stable of writers. He asked for a copy of a baseball book I had written. If the Internet was around then he could have ordered it for a nickel.

In the years since Malcolm Gladwell has become a publishing sensation. He has twice topped the best-sellers lists, first with The Tipping Point and then with Blink. In the new millennium he is considered at the forefront of writers who work the nexus of culture, psychology, statistics and, well, you fill in the blank. He has made it his life’s work to debunk the conventional wisdom. If you come across a bit of thinking that’s out of the box, well, it’s likely he took it out and has already put the box out to be recycled.

Okay, this is a junior hockey column and it seems that I’ve strayed an awful long way from the arena, but humour me.

Gladwell has come out with a new book titled The Outliers: The Story of Success. I’m not going to get into what he has written about chess grandmasters, the Beatles, Bill Gates and others who qualify as life’s successes and even geniuses. I’m going to focus on Chapter One.

Junior hockey can’t find its way into major city newspapers in this country but, no matter. The Globe and Mail and the entire CanWest chain can splash the name of the Medicine Hat Tigers across their front pages tomorrow and they won’t reach as many eyes as the latest tome by Malcolm Gladwell. He is a global brand.

In The Outliers Gladwell writes about the Medicine Hat Tigers team that went to the Memorial Cup in Vancouver a couple of years back, a plucky team that lost 3-1 to the host Giants in the final. Vancouver and Medicine Hat were so clearly the two best teams in 2007 that it wasn’t up for discussion. If junior hockey was played at a higher level that season it was played by those same two teams when they met in the opening round, a game that the Tigers won 1-0. My memory is going on me but I can’t remember another 1-0 game that had all in attendance on shpilkis the way this tllt did.

Gladwell gets a lot of his junior hockey stuff right or mostly right.

"Canadian junior hockey is a meritocracy."

Right.

"If your ... team plays for the Memorial Cup, that means you are at the very top of the top of the pyramid."

You are correct, sir. (SNL doesn’t allow Canadians to access video clips of the late Phil Hartman, a great Canadian, doing his Ed McMahon. But I digress.)

"You can’t buy your way into Major Junior A hockey (sic)."

I’m sure that he’s intending "Major Junior" here, but has mashed it up with Junior A, another category, but no matter, we know what he means. And he’s right. There’s no favour that you can buy that will land your son on the Medicine Hat Tigers, the Vancouver Giants or other lesser teams -- though if you’re determined to try, call these guys with five wins in 30 games.

"Hockey is a good place to start because of the explanation of who gets to the top of the hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than it looks. In fact, it’s downright peculiar."

Okay, here Gladwell, who was a heckuva middle-distance runner, starts losing command of his subject material.

Then Gladwell trots out the line-up of the Medicine Hat Tigers of 2006-07. Please give this a close look before reading further.

Gladwell asks if you can see "anything strange about the list."

Gladwell launches into an explanation of "relative age," a concept that originated with a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley. Barnsley was at a Lethbridge Broncos game, Gladwell writes, when he was struck by the fact that there were a lot of birthdays clustered in the first four months of the year. Gladwell duly cites statistics that show more players in "the Ontario Junior Hockey League (sic)" are born in January than in any other month. February runs second. The same dynamic applies to travelling teams in lower age groups right through to the NHL. Then the big reveal: 17 out of 25 players on the Medicine Hat Tigers roster at the Memorial Cup were born in the first four months of the year.

Gladwell says the explanation for the phenomenon is "quite simple." He points to January 1 as the cut-off date for age-class hockey in this country. (He could have noted that this is the method of breaking down age groups for hockey around the world.) Gladwell argues that, in youth hockey, tyke, atom, what-have-you, this favours players born closer to but not before New Year. Those who are born in the last three or four months of the year are presumed to be at a competitive disadvantage growing up and thus have their genius stifled. This leads into his larger argument that talent and genius have a circumstantial aspect -- some people are lucky enough to land in the clover to utilize their talent. The New York Times reviewer noted that this is a component of Gladwell’s own story: "(He is) not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities."

Okay, back to hockey. Gladwell suggests the Rx for this birthdate-driven inequality, staggering age-group hockey at six-month intervals. Great … it will be even harder to get ice time.

To his credit, Gladwell doesn’t claim to have come up with this theory and cites his sources.

Okay, I’m now going to refer you back to the list. Study it again and tell me if you see anything strange … or at least anything that will shoot a hole in Gladwell’s argument.

I’ll start the egg-timer ... A little music, maestro … Time’s up. Did you get it? Let me help you.

Q: How many first-round draft choices are on that Med Hat team?

A: One. Tyler Ennis, born Oct. 6, 1989, selected by Buffalo last June.

Q: Three players on the Tigers roster have played in the NHL this season. Who has played the most games?

A: Derek Dorsett has played 12 games as of this weekend for the Columbus Blue Jackets. He was born Dec. 20, 1986. With a birthday like that it’s a miracle that he made it out of Kindersley, Sask!

Okay, you can make your case that the best pro prospect from that Tigers team is Darren Helm, a January birthday and a guy who made an impression with some spot service for the Red Wings in the Cup final last spring. But I’d counter with the fact that the best player on that 2006-07 season in Medicine Hat was defenceman Kris Russell, Dub MVP and a May birthday just like his twin brother.

Yeah, there are a lot of guys with January, February and March birthdays on that team -- and that Memorial Cup final in Vancouver was the last you’d hear of most of them -- maybe as many as 16 of the 17.

Okay, let’s try this: In last June's draft , how many players selected in the top 10 were born in January? One, Alex Pietrangelo of the Niagara IceDogs. How many were born in December? Two, Drew Doughty, these days lights-out on the blue line for the L.A. Kings, and Mikkel Boedker, who’s sticking around with Phoenix. Toronto’s Luke Schenn, the most likely player to survive Unhappy Hour with Brian Burke in Toronto, is a November birthday. Josh Bailey, sticking around with the Islanders, and Colin Wilson, the future of the Predators if they have a future, are October birthdays.

By Gladwell’s reckoning all these autumn and early winter birthdays were at a developmental disadvantage growing up -- imagine how good they’d be if they weren’t so stifled.

Okay, granted, Steven Stamkos and Cody Hodgson are February birthdays. But Nikita Filatov (May) and Zach Bogosian (July) don’t fit Gladwell’s model along with the five others born late in the year.

Numbers are such fun but really tiring. Let’s try some names that might be familiar to you playing along at home.

2004: Alexander Ovechkin, late Sept. (Remember Rick Dudley trying to sneak him into the draft as a late-round pick, claiming Leap Years shouldn’t count against the player.) Evengi Malkin, July 31.

2005: Sidney Crosby, the almost magical 8/7/87.

2006: Erik Johnson, March, but the rest of the top five leans to the last pages of the calendar; Jordan Staal, September, Phil Kessel, October, and Nicklas Backstrom November. In fact, Staal made the jump directly to the league even though it turned out he was the youngest player drafted in the 2006. In at the last possible date.

2007: Patrick Kane, November

This might be enough to satisfy some but I aim to please all others.

I can’t think of a worse time than now for Gladwell to mount a case for the advantages of the early birthday.

There’s some disagreement over who will be the first player taken in next year’s NHL draft but whoever it is won’t be opening any gifts for a long time after Christmas. Oshawa’s-for-now John Tavares is a September birthday and Swedish defenceman Victor Hedman is a December birthday.

Projected first overall in 2010 is Windsor’s Taylor Hall, November

What gives?

I think it goes to Gladwell’s assumptions. A couple are flawed.

1. The January cut-off date. For all intents and purposes, January 1 isn’t a big deal, not for the top five percent and especially not for the top two or three percent. It matters less and less the higher up you go. The very best 12-year-old players will be "playing up." In the case of Crosby he was playing up two and three age groups. Tavares always played up. That’s how it goes across the board. The notion that the kid with a late birthday is at a physical disadvantage against a January-February-or-March kid applies to the middle of the pack, but the best kids will be playing a year or two ahead of what their birth certificates would dictate -- you could even mount the case that the late birthday might actually work in their favour sometimes, offer them opportunities for stiffer challenges earlier in their development. Talk to young players and their coaches and they’ll talk about "getting challenged." Well, playing slightly older kids -- we're talking by months -- is the next best thing to playing those a year or two older. To my mind, too many kids are pushed to play up, more than is appropriate, but there’s a reason they try: It works for the best of them.

2. What the Medicine Hat Tigers signify. Look at the quote again: "If your ... team plays for the Memorial Cup, that means you are at the very top of the top of the pyramid." No, actually that means your team is, not you individually. The very top of the top of the pyramid is represented by the draft, by the very top of the top picks, the players who are within spitting distance of genius. In recent years the draft doesn’t make Gladwell’s case. It obliterates it.

Oh yeah, if you’re wondering ... I’m one of those guys who says Mario (October) over 99 (January).