This is my third look for the 20
The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his (annual) 2012/13 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).
Note that for reasons of comparability, players' cap hits being published as full-season equivalents and above all, laziness, I have made no attempt to adjust the calculations to account for the 48-game season.
Rather than measuring the figures at month ends, as I have done in previous seasons, I'll be cutting the shortened season into 12-game chunks. So this analysis covers every team up to the 36-game point.
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 first 36 games of the regular season, 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)
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The following is a ranking of teams by CHIP over Games 25-36 only, to further illustrate some of the biggest movers since last time:
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10 second analysis...
Despite almost keeping pace with the Senators' injuries and winning the fewest number of games in the whole league, the Panthers impressively still lead the ultra-competitive, high-quality Southeast Divison by 23 points. The rival Hurricanes lead the league in men lost, having (I think) re-re-re-acquired Zach Boychuk.
The Penguins' expensive-looking outlier in this quarter was mostly due to Evgeni Malkin. The Flames practically had an injury-free quarter, aside from the continued absence of low-cost Paul Byron, plus Jay Feaster's frontal lobotomy.
The next lists are the top 30 individual CHIP and CMIP contributions:
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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.
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Man-games lost per game so far this year are 5.8, down from 6.8 last year and 6.6 in 2010/11. (All figures clearly distorted somewhat by long-term injuries existing before seasons begin. And the rapid advances in the league's cutting edge treatment of concussions, of course...)
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), "Flu" (i.e. concussion) or "None of your business" (i.e. Rick Nash concussion) should also be included.
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Four previous possessors of zeros here have clammed up to some degree, leaving the Oilers to fly the flag of transparency alone. Unless Steve Tambellini is just missing a trick here? Nah...
Notes/Disclaimers
- Figures
exclude a few minor-leaguers / marginal NHLers (usually an
arbitrary judgement on my part - you tell me whether Matt Taormina is/was still an NHLer at the start of the season...) 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 obviously 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 (RIP), 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 guess I'll take a similar approach to a player traded where cap hit is retained by his old team - Jussi Jokinen and Jason Pominville appear to be the test cases once one of them gets injured..
- 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
