is a perfectly cromulent community of Canucks fans. It鈥檚 a great place to discuss Canucks news, celebrate after a win, commiserate after a loss, and post the dankest of memes about Loui Eriksson鈥檚 facial expressions.
And sometimes it鈥檚 a place where you can find the most unhinged works of disturbed genius.
The latter is the case for a by a user that goes by the sobriquet of 鈥淎dmiralFartmore.鈥� According to Mr. Fartmore, he was 鈥渋n the tub鈥� thinking about the Canucks鈥� dreadful 9-2 loss to the Lightning when something his father once said came to mind: 鈥淚f you want to succeed, you need to have a lot of skin in the game.鈥�
Perhaps u/AdmiralFartmore would say to me, 鈥淧lease, Mr. Fartmore was my father; call me Admiral.鈥� .
The phrase 鈥渟kin in the game鈥� was popularized by Warren Buffett and is intended as a metaphor: in order to be successful, whether in finance or other realms, you need to be heavily invested, to the point that you incur risk. If you don鈥檛 have 鈥渟kin in the game,鈥� if you鈥檙e not risking something, you鈥檒l never be rewarded; unlike , you鈥檒l never be The Man.
Fartmore took this in an entirely different direction, interpreting the phrase entirely literally. In order for the Canucks to win, in this view, they need to have a lot of skin in the game 鈥� literal skin.
Clearly having skin in the game is necessary in the NHL. In Fartmore鈥檚 words, 鈥淭here are no skinless teams and there are no skinless players.鈥� But does the amount of skin matter for success and do the Canucks have more skin in the game than other teams in the NHL? That鈥檚 what Fartmore set out to discover.
He did so by using the publicly available height and weight of every player and used the Mosteller formula 鈥� a real formula used in medical practice 鈥� to estimate the Body Surface Area (BSA) of each player, then combined the measurements of individual players to find the amount of skin on every team in the NHL.
Tyler Myers comes in with the most skin, as you might expect as the second-tallest player in the NHL, but the hefty Jake Virtanen is a close second. At the other end of the skin spectrum are Elias Pettersson, Troy Stecher, and Quinn Hughes.
Yes, this is all super weird, bringing to mind , particularly when he breaks down how that the difference in skin between Myers and Hughes is "enough skin to cover the average 10-month old toddler or that the total skin of the Canucks 鈥� 47.8 square meters 鈥� is 鈥渏ust enough to make one tandem parachute.鈥�
On the other hand, as someone who spent hours this summer figuring out , including some extra time in the comments calculating the weight of the 鈥渨ild鈥� in the logo for the Minnesota Wild*, it鈥檚 hard to avoid feeling like Fartmore is a part of my tribe. A really messed up part.
, but the essential conclusion is that 鈥渟kin in the game鈥� has only a mild correlation with success, as measured by comparing BSA to Stanley Cup odds. It's not enough to just have a lot of skin; you need a lot of skill within that skin.
As silly as it seems, however, there may actually be some practical value to using skin 鈥� or BSA, if you want to sound less like a serial killer 鈥� to measure the size of a team.
鈥淎s measuring BSA incorporates both height and weight,鈥� said Fartmore, 鈥渋t may be more effective than discussing the two attributes separately when discussing size of NHL teams. At least, it should be used in conjunction with the two.鈥�
There are plenty of outliers too: Quinn Hughes has the least skin on the Canucks due to his combination of size and weight, but certainly plays bigger than his skin, which is probably the oddest thing ever written about Quinn Hughes. In any case, remember to .
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*The weight of the components of the Wild鈥檚 logo 鈥� a cougar ghost, five trees, a river, the moon, and the north star 鈥� came out to 13,200,000,162,000,000,161,000,000,025,000.0463 lbs.
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