James Mirtle started it:

So I got out my old saved table of the Leafs Roster from a previous post and compared the new weights to the old.

# Name New Weight Old Weight Difference
46 Roman Polak 237.00 236.00 1.00
23 Shawn Matthias 231.00 223.00 8.00
3 Dion Phaneuf 227.00 214.00 13.00
21 James Van Riemsdyk 217.00 200.00 17.00
34 James Reimer 217.00 208.00 9.00
44 Morgan Rielly 217.00 205.00 12.00
19 Joffrey Lupul 211.00 206.00 5.00
47 Leo Komarov 211.00 198.00 13.00
25 Rich Clune 207.00 216.00 -9.00
26 Daniel Winnik 203.00 207.00 -4.00
32 Josh Leivo 203.00 195.00 8.00
52 Martin Marincin 203.00 203.00 0.00
56 Byron Froese 199.00 190.00 9.00
15 Pierre-Alexandre Parenteau 198.00 197.00 1.00
16 Nick Spaling 198.00 201.00 -3.00
24 Peter Holland 198.00 194.00 4.00
28 Brad Boyes 198.00 195.00 3.00
20 Frank Corrado 197.00 190.00 7.00
51 Jake Gardiner 196.00 184.00 12.00
42 Tyler Bozak 195.00 195.00 0.00
2 Matt Hunwick 194.00 190.00 4.00
43 Nazem Kadri 193.00 188.00 5.00
40 Michael Grabner 185.00 187.00 -2.00
45 Jonathan Bernier 184.00 185.00 -1.00
Average 204.96 200.29 4.67

It's not a big change overall: The average size of the team hasn't even gone up 5 pounds, and we don't know if some of the old numbers were just out of date or not. But some of those big changes are reasonably significant.

Rielly and Gardiner, van Riemsdyk and Komarov, none of those guys are known for their size. Komarov, for using it maybe!

I don't want to judge anyone's body or disparage it, but I am wondering how you decide when weight is slowing you down or when more would provide better acceleration or a more powerful stride.

It's easy to fall into the habit of thinking of size as something that wins battles on the boards or helps you stand a guy up at the blueline, but hockey is a much more complex game than that, and agility and stopping time get you goals too--think here of any of the truly gifted smaller players like Johnny Gaudreau or Jeff Skinner.

Jaromir Jagr has talked about dropping weight to gain speed, but he was a very big man before he did that. I look at older, slower players like Phaneuf and I wonder a little.

But, one of the things the new order at Leafs headquarters has done is hire a Director of Sports Science & Performance so it seems from the outside like they are taking an evidence based approach.

Imagine the Leafs lineup as it is now and then swap out Polak for Corrado. That's a big change in overall size. Not every coach is comfortable with that.