The evaluation of certain psychological characteristics could reduce the risk for scouts of letting slip a young hockey player whose full talent will hatch later, indicates work carried out at Laval University.
The work has been carried out for several years by postdoctoral student Daniel Fortin-Guichard in collaboration with the Quebec Remparts, of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. The data that has just been published relates to an initial cohort of 95 players that the club’s scouts were interested in in 2019.
A hundred young people were also met in 2022 and around sixty this year, but these data are not part of the new study.
The young players had to answer a self-regulation questionnaire, a characteristic that designates the ability to derive maximum learning from the lessons offered to us.
“Self-regulation is a psychological aspect of adolescence that has been shown to predict future success in sport,” Fortin-Guichard said.
“It is the ability to exercise control over our own learning. These are young people who will tend to plan properly, “monitor” their learning in real time, review their learning, self-evaluate their learning, put effort into their learning…”
Other tests measured psychological characteristics that influence thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
The researchers also used videos to measure each participant’s anticipatory capacity, decision-making and attentional process. At different times during the action, the image was paused and the participant had to predict what would happen next and say what he would have done in the same situation.
During the viewing, a device recorded participants’ eye movements, which provided measures of attention, anticipation and decision-making.
“When you combine all that together, you realize that you are able to detect a certain psychological profile in young people, which the Remparts scouts told us, three years later, that they should have fished out”, said Mr. Fortin-Guichard.
In other words, he adds, three years after collecting the data, the researchers again asked Remparts scouts which players, after seeing them in action for three seasons at the junior level, they liked to have (or would have liked to have) on their team.
Of the 95 players evaluated, 70 were drafted after the second round, above the 36th rank, which means that the scouts did not consider them among the elite of their cohort.
But three years later, scouts said they would select 15 of those 70 players for their club. However, in 2019, these players were either not drafted by the Remparts at all, or were drafted late, because “their talent was latent”, explained Mr. Fortin-Guichard.
The researchers combed through the psychological data collected from these 15 players. They found that these young people had a higher self-regulation score than the others and that their strategy for visually scanning video images was more dynamic.
“These young people had a fairly homogeneous psychological profile, but also quite different from that of the players whom the Remparts did not want three years later”, explained the researcher.
Thirty-eight others of the seventy players had played at least ten games in the league three years later. These players presented a psychological profile similar to that of the 15 players qualified as sleepers, in particular with regard to self-regulation and eye movements.
The scouts, Fortin-Guichard said, are excellent at determining which players are good “now,” and assessing technical and tactical abilities weighs heavily in the balance. But the more the repechage progresses, the more the scouts look for players whose philosophy or psychological characteristics will correspond to those of the club.
That’s when the model he developed could identify potential prospects who, instead of slipping to the eighth or ninth round, would be drafted in the sixth.
Mr. Fortin-Guichard never sees young hopefuls on the ice. The ranking he gives to the Remparts is therefore purely objective and is based solely on the psychological characteristics of the players.
The data currently available, again, only relates to players who were encountered in 2019. A more global picture will emerge in 2026-2027, when the approximately 250 players encountered throughout the study will be aged 18 or 19 and will all have finished their careers in the junior ranks.
“I will be able to give a much more definitive answer to whether the psychological characteristics as measured help the screeners in their decisions, said Mr. Fortin-Guichard. Should scouts use our rankings to make decisions about who is a sleeper? For now, I’m going to stay on the safe side and say yes to 6 out of 10.”
Given the confidentiality that surrounds participation in a scientific study, it is impossible for the moment to know whether a player identified through Mr. Fortin-Guichard’s system is part of the current Remparts roster or, even better, has contributed to their recent Memorial Cup victory.
The big question, of course, is whether the same system could be used by National Hockey League clubs to scout the next Martin St-Louis or the next Jonathan Marchessault, two stars who have never been drafted.
The study focused on 15-year-olds, Fortin-Guichard said. It is therefore impossible to say whether the predictors that have been chosen, such as self-regulation or eye movement, also apply to 17-year-olds, especially since we know that self-regulation tends to stabilize with age.
We could, however, start the study again at year zero with these older players and see if, over the next five years, new predictors emerge to identify those who will play in the NHL at 23, 24 or 25.
“It’s not at all the same prediction to meet a 15-year-old player to see if he’s going to play at 17 than to meet a 17-year-old player to see if he’s going to play at 25 or 26,” concluded Mr. Fortin-Guichard.
The findings of this study were published by the Journal of Sports Science.
