The Pain Game

Injury stats update – end of season awards

This is the final update for the 2009/10 regular season looking 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 corresponding analysis as at the end of February 2010 can be viewed HERE.)

The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2009/10 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).

Yes, I'm still doing the extra bit ...

Again, for a different indicator of player "value", I've also illustrated a similar metric based on TOI/G alongside the CHIP numbers.

While acknowledging cap charge is a less than perfect measure of player, with a number of limitations and inconsistencies, I'm not totally sold on TOI/G as being any better overall (I'm guessing Mike Mottau isn't a significantly more important player to the Devils than Zach Parise) - it does provide a decent comparison and the results do vary from the CHIP rankings 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)
• 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 (e.g. Mike Van Ryn) 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 (Kurt Sauer), 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 figures...

The table below shows:

• Total CHIP for each team over the 2009/10 regular season
  
• 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)
• Movement in CHIP ranking since 28 February
  
• 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...

Rather predictably, the Oilers manage to hold on to their big lead and easily claim the much-coveted title of The Most Injured Team in the NHL 2009/10.

Interestingly, despite a clearly horrendous run of injuries this year, neither the Oilers' total man-games lost nor CHIP figure would have ranked #1 last year (see HERE for the 2008/09 rankings).

Also, while the aggregate CHIP figure league-wide was just shy of $200m, this is still $25m lower than the corresponding figure for 2008/09 - perhaps unexpected given all the conjecture earlier in the season about an injury epidemic and the effect of the Olympic break.

At the other end, largely thanks to a late injury to Ryan Malone, the Rangers clinch an unprecedented (OK, only two years of compiling this doesn't give much opportunity for precedent...) second consecutive 30th place finish. Something the esteemed GM of the team has seemingly been straining to achieve in the real NHL standings for the last 10 years, without success. Not for want of trying.

Again, there doesn't appear to be much more than a weak correlation between the extent of injuries and a team's position in the standings - the three healthiest teams all missed the playoffs, for example. (The dubious sanity of the GMs in question has not been allowed for here.)

The next lists are the top 30 individual CHIP and CMIP contributions:


P-M Bouchard's virtually season-long concussion results in his leading of the CHIP table. Ricky DP's "flu" - yes, that's "flu" - not quite emerging soon enough to trouble the podium. There's always next year, eh Rick? And the next 12...

I suspect next year's figures will no longer be distorted by the impact of Mike Rathje's unretired corpse. This may or may not be due to Paul Holmgren re-signing him to be the Flyers' next saviour in goal.

BONUS

Finally, 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.


Notes/Disclaimers

• Figures include (and are arguably distorted by) some players on long-term IR, such as Mike Rathje. They do exclude a few minor-leaguers who are or had been on the NHL club’s IR since pre-season
  
• There are undoubtedly a few inaccuracies and inconsistencies in there - I did the best I could 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, Randy Jones), 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 hockeybuzz.com and capgeek.com

The Ranger Movie Series

Apparently it was the Oscars last week. I didn't watch - as a Rangers fan, I spend most of the year seeing someone spend a ridiculous amount of money on a load of people in blue only to end up losing, so there was no need to get another fix of that. (Edmonton fans - insert "Hurt Locker" gag here...)

Anyway, as a tribute to (in no particular order), the Rangers, a string of cinematic epics that I've never seen and my penchant for bad puns and pretty ropey Photoshops, I present the New York Ranger Movie Series: in association with Subway $5 Footlongs.

Brian's dilemma: Should he pay Vinny $1.1m to play around with somebody else?



"Because Chris Drury is Chris Drury. Two thumbs up" - Roger Ebert



Adapted from the popular comic book series "2014 No D"



Ales escapes an abusive relationship with John by travelling across
North America in order to seek a better life

Now playing on Broadway after initially coming to prominence at Arizona Film Festival

A violent hit-man's struggles to gain acceptance in New York "family"



Two men investigate the disappearance of a 20-goal scorer
at a hospital for criminally insane GMs


Tales of ineffectual relationships, wasteful spending and
a fight against the ravages of time, (once) set in Manhattan

The Pain Game

Injury stats update – February 2010

[Looking for more up-to-date figures? For my latest update, try HERE.]

This is my penultimate look for the 2009/10 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 corresponding analysis as at the end of January 2010 can be viewed HERE.)

The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2009/10 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).

Yes, I'm still doing the extra bit ...

Again, for a different indicator of player "value", I've also illustrated a similar metric based on TOI/G alongside the CHIP numbers.

While acknowledging cap charge is a less than perfect measure of player, with a number of limitations and inconsistencies, I'm not totally sold on TOI/G as being any better overall (I'm guessing Mike Mottau isn't a significantly more important player to the Devils than Zach Parise) - it does provide a decent comparison and the results do vary from the CHIP rankings somewhat.

A quick summary of the alternative metric:

• TOI/G (through games played prior to the Olympic break) 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)
• 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 (e.g. Mike Van Ryn) 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 (Kurt Sauer), 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 figures...

The table below shows:

• Total CHIP for each team for the 2009/10 regular season (through games played in February, i.e. before the Olympic break)
• 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)
• Movement in CHIP ranking since 31 January
  
• 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...

As teams only played six or seven games in February, like Hal Gill at the end of shift, there's obviously not a huge amount of movement.

With the Red Wings now looking relatively healthy, it's looking pretty clear that the Oilers have an insurmountable lead (a phrase not heard by anyone this season). I don't have the figures, but I suspect they are also way ahead if I rank the teams by DUIIP.

The Lightning equally have a nice cushion at the other end of the ranking, which may widen thanks to the long-awaited outbreak of Gabby Groin in Manhattan. Based on limited personal observation, their good health can probably be attributed in large part to an extreme reluctance to get in the way of opposition players as they head towards goal.

The next lists are the top 30 individual CHIP and CMIP contributions:


Again, not a huge amount of movement here, but after a personal best 10 straight minutes of good health, the apparent return of Ricky DP's knee-knack gives him a slight chance of threatening the leaders once again.

Notes/Disclaimers

• Figures include (and are arguably distorted by) some players on long-term IR, such as Mike Rathje (still seemingly unretired, despite being out for three years and 27 Flyers goalies). They do exclude a few minor-leaguers who are or had been on the NHL club’s IR since pre-season
  
• There are undoubtedly a few inaccuracies and inconsistencies in there - I did the best I could 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, Randy Jones), 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 hockeybuzz.com and capgeek.com

Olympian NHL Shootout Records: Part II

After looking at the NHL shootout records of forwards and defenseman (HERE) featuring in the Olympics, now for the goalies.

Again, the tables show both overall records in NHL shootouts and records in facing "clutch attempts", defined as those attempts that either clinch a win or keep a shootout going.

Obviously, pretty small sample sizes all round, so nowhere near being anything that could be predictive to any useful degree (Will Russia yank Nabokov before a shootout to put Varlamov in? No. Oh, wait this is Russia we're talking about...) However, mildly interesting to note that Finland's dangerous shooters aren't matched by the records of their top two goalies (perhaps completely counter to the strengths and weaknesses of the team in regular play). The reverse is the case to some extent for Sweden.

Olympian NHL Shootout Records

Having seen a breakdown of the NHL shootout records of Team Canada's skaters HERE - following the startling revelation that a coaching staff actually thought looking at career shootout records might be a good idea - I figured it would be worth a look at how the other countries' players have fared.

The usual fascinating tables follow, showing both overall records in NHL shootouts and records in "clutch attempts", defined as those attempts that either clinch a win or keep a shootout going.

Obviously, this isn't a definitive list of which players might be the most dangerous in an Olympic shootout - apparently some players not heavily featured here (or at all) might have taken shootout attempts in some distant land called "Europe" on occasion. And Russia's coach clearly has a different set of statistics to everybody else.

Similar figures for the Olympic goalies with NHL shootout experience may follow at some point...









Stats courtesy of nhl.com and nhlshootouts.com

The Pain Game

Injury stats update – January 2010

[Looking for more up-to-date figures? For my latest update, try HERE.]

This is my fourth look for the 2009/10 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 corresponding analysis as at the end of December 2009 can be viewed HERE.)

The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2009/10 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).

Yes, I'm still doing the extra bit ...

Again, for a different indicator of player "value", I've also illustrated a similar metric based on TOI/G alongside the CHIP numbers.

While acknowledging cap charge is a less than perfect measure of player, with a number of limitations and inconsistencies, I'm not totally sold on TOI/G as being any better overall (Tom Poti is as valuable to the Capitals as Alex Ovechkin. Discuss.) - it does provide a decent comparison and the results do vary from the CHIP rankings somewhat.

A quick summary of the new metric:

• TOI/G (through games played on 31 January) 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)
• 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 (e.g. Mike Van Ryn) 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 (Kurt Sauer), 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 figures...

The table below shows:

• Total CHIP for each team for the 2009/10 regular season (through games played on 31 January)
• 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)
• Movement in CHIP ranking since 31 December
  
• 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...

The Oilers predictably keep top spot as the "conundrum of our physiological synapse" as Tom Renney would describe it continues as fast as "our f***ing brutal losing streak" as Pat Quinn would describe it. The Red Wings, however, are still doing a fine job keeping a close pace.

Teams with improved positions include Les Smurfs (pre-Cammalleri injury at least), the Islanders and the Flyers. Rumour has it there has even been a healthy DP sighting! (Note that his CHIP number has also been adjusted down somewhat - blame various boring IR/AHL conditioning stint complications...)

The Rangers continue to have a second straight season of remarkable good health - only missing an average 14 minutes per game. Not to be confused with Chris Drury's very average 14 minutes per game. The question I have posed in the past as to the reason why the Rangers have stayed healthy has almost certainly been answered by now (yes, they do play an extremely soft game).

The next lists are the top 30 individual CHIP and CMIP contributions:


The return to health of last month's top three CHIP leaders sees Monsieur Bouchard take top spot, with surely (and unfortunately) a strong chance of staying there. Kari Lehtonen now has a huge lead in the CMIP table, thanks to DiPietro actually showing up for work (and his value in minutes being adjusted accordingly), but Lehtonen is also apparently on the way back now.

BONUS

And finally, an update of my crude analysis of maladies by body part. The results (again covering games played through 31 January) are in the table below. 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 (a special shout out to the Carolina Hurricanes, seemingly league leaders in the upper/lower body description junk). It should give a broad indication, if nothing else, though.

Pretty sure watching the Rangers that I've seen plenty more players with "heart" problems than this analysis seems to indicate...

Notes/Disclaimers

• Figures include (and are arguably distorted by) some players on long-term IR, such as Mike Rathje (there’s a fair argument that Rathje shouldn’t be on here, since I can’t imagine he’ll either play again or that the Flyers are missing him - and his TOI/G number from 1973/74 when he last played is clearly overstating his value a touch). They do exclude a few minor-leaguers who are or had been on the NHL club’s IR since pre-season
  
• There are undoubtedly a few inaccuracies and inconsistencies in there - I did the best I could with the information out there. Some corrections are picked up month-to-month too (see DiPietro, Rick)
  
• 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, Randy Jones), 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 hockeybuzz.com and capgeek.com

The NHL Dictionary - fresh new content!

So, here's another ultimately pointless update of declining quality to my existing collection (found HERE).

The concept (for newcomers and the forgetful) - take any word or phrase from the dictionary, add/subtract/change one letter, supply new definition. Et voilà, as José Theodore would say (four or five times a game).

Ballard - wild duck, as in manoeuvre performed by goalies in Florida to avoid stick-swinging team-mates

Carcilogen - dangerous substance or agent that tends to cause invasive and destructive disease

Carnivoros - characterised by destructive or predatory behaviour, exhibited by players having the fortune to face the Rangers' #34 in a fight

Demonsterate - to present by experiments, examples or practical application that a terrible defense does not help the statistics of Swedish rookie goalies

Inaugeration - formal induction of a player in the official bad books of all NHL officials

Make It Steven - media campaign instigated by Jim Balsillie, designed to promote the repatriation of Mr Stamkos to southern Ontario from the hands of evil sun-belt franchise

Payn threshold - the upper limit of John Davidson's tolerance for Andy Murray's coaching

Reddline - to discriminate against by refusing to make significant financial commitment to, as practiced by 29 NHL GMs

Redd line - stationary marker on a hockey rink, not featuring in the offensive and defensive zones

War broom - implement used by NHL Hockey Operations department to sweep controversy under the carpet