This is my fourth look for the 2011/12 regular season at which teams have been hit hardest by injuries by trying to place a value on the games missed by players due to injury/illness.
The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2011/12 cap charge, then take the aggregate of these figures for each team and divide by 82. This indicator of value lost to a team by injury/illness is called CHIP (Cap Hit of Injured Players).
Alternatively...
Again,
for a different indicator of player "value", I've also
illustrated a similar metric based on TOI/G alongside the CHIP
numbers. Clearly, neither cap charge nor TOI/G are perfect
measures of player value, since each have a number of limitations
and inconsistencies, but they provide a decent comparison and the
results do vary somewhat.A quick summary of the alternative metric:
- TOI/G replaces cap charge as the measure of value in the calculation
- For goalies, TOI/G has been worked out as Total Minutes Played / Games Dressed For* - i.e. a goalie playing every minute of 75% of the games, zero in the rest, would end up with a TOI/G of 45 minutes (or close to it, once you factor in OT and so on). [*Actually, "Games Played by Team - Games Missed by Goalie" - I'm not inclined to disentangle any three-goalie systems or minor-league conditioning stints.]
- This arguably overstates the worth of starting goalies somewhat,
but it's simple and you could equally argue that a workhorse goalie
is the hardest position to replace, so it's fair for them to have a
much higher TOI/G figure
- Where a player hasn't played all year or where a player fairly clearly has a reduced TOI/G figure due to getting injured in their only game or one of very few games, I've used TOI/G from last season (or further back if necessary)
- For each player, multiply games missed by TOI/G to get (for a more palatable name) Cumulative Minutes of Injured Player (CMIP)
- Take the aggregate of CMIP for the team and divide by games played by the team to arrive at AMIP (Average Minutes of Injured Players) - it feels more understandable expressing this metric as an average per game (whereas CHIP is a running total)
The table below shows:
- Total CHIP for each team over the 2011/12 regular season (through games played up to the All-Star break), as well as the distribution of CHIP by position
- The player who has contributed most to the team's CHIP figure
- The number of players with a CHIP contribution of over $250,000 (think of it as being equivalent to a $1m player missing 20 games or a $4m player missing five games)
- AMIP for each team over the same period (e.g. an AMIP of 40:00 could be seen as the team missing two 20-minute per game players for every game this season)
10 second analysis...
Also some separation at the bottom (coincidentally the name of Rick DiPietro's next injury...) as the Wings and Hawks remain relatively healthy, the annual Red Wing All-Star flu apart. The Bruins also pretty much injury-free, if Marc Savard's long-term absence is excluded.
Not sure why the Lightning aren't leading the table by a mile, given Guy Boucher's recent propensity to complain about the number of injuries his underachieving team has been coping with. Maybe they are just hidden so well as to not exist (perhaps...see below).
The next lists are the top 30 individual CHIP and CMIP contributions:
As could be expected, what are tending towards season-long absences dominate these tables now. The Sauer brothers are beginning to sadly display some Lindros-esque attributes.
Where does it hurt?
This is another update of the crude injury-by-location analysis. Again, I’ve just used the descriptions found in the player profiles on tsn.ca, so the figures will encompass all the inaccuracies and vagueness within them. It should give a broad indication, if nothing else, though.
Finally, a look at the Evasiveness Index. This is basically the proportion of injury instances for each team that have been described as either "Undisclosed" or the helpfully pointless "Upper/Lower Body" in the same TSN profiles. I have made no judgement about whether the many instances of "Illness" (i.e. concussion) or "Flu" (i.e. concussion) should also be included.
Notes/Disclaimers
- Figures
exclude a few minor-leaguers / marginal NHLers (perhaps an
arbitrary judgement on my part in some cases) who had
been on the NHL club’s IR since pre-season. Generally, if a
minor-leaguer gets called up and then injured in an NHL game, his games
missed will then count towards the CHIP though. Minor-league conditioning stints immediately after/during a
period on IR might be included in the man-games lost figures (but can't guarantee I get
it right every time)
- There are undoubtedly a few inaccuracies and inconsistencies in
there - I do the best I can with the information out there. Some
corrections are picked up month-to-month too
- The cap figure doesn't really correlate very well to the "worth" of a player in some cases, e.g. where rookie bonuses are included this year, where players are seeing out an old (underpaid or rookie) contract or where players are horrendously overpaid
- Also, for any player who was acquired on re-entry waivers (e.g. Sean Avery), the cap hit will only reflect that for their current team, i.e. 50% of the player’s full cap hit (shared between his current and old teams)
- I've once again stuck a full team-by-team listing of games missed and CHIP/CMIP numbers by each player on the web HERE
- Injury/games/TOI info courtesy of tsn.ca and nhl.com - man-games lost info more than likely does not exactly match up with the "official" figures released by individual teams
- Cap info courtesy of capgeek.com
