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Stu Hackel Week on Arctic Ice Hockey: Man games-lost to injury - "Stats the NHL Ought to Keep"

Stu writes: "Man games-lost to injury. I wrote about that stat last week, and it’s one that teams make available to the media, but no one is certain how consistent the numbers are team to team. Some apparently fold every game their players miss into that category, and that’s not right. To do it correctly, we’d break everything down into these categories: Games missed due to a) injury; b) illness; c) suspension; d) personal reasons; e) healthy scratch."

Edit: Springing Malik tabulated injuries for years. I could not for the life of me remember where I'd seen it. Many apologies to Malik...

I uploaded the official list of injuries since the lockout (I forgot Atlanta for what I will claim are obvious reasons.) Here are teams ranked by reported injuries:

Star-divide

Team Man Games Team Man Games Team Man Games
NYI 591 DAL 450 TOR 362
MIN 577 WSH 430 SJS 360
BUF 541 CHI 424 TBL 359
CBJ 512 PIT 417 NYR 333
OTT 512 CGY 406 FLA 329
COL 508 NSH 396 NJD 310
CAR 491 VAN 396 ANA 275
DET 481 EDM 395 STL 265
BOS 476 LOS 392 PHX 232
PHI 469 MTL 391

And by scratch/health scratch:

Team Man Games Team Man Games Team Man Games
ANA 926 MIN 722 PHI 605
PHX 881 VAN 711 DET 593
LOS 861 SJS 710 CHI 561
NJD 795 TOR 707 BOS 524
EDM 789 BUF 691 TBL 491
CGY 758 WSH 686 FLA 487
COL 757 CBJ 684 NYI 436
DAL 749 NSH 667 CAR 427
MTL 735 NYR 661 OTT 400
STL 729 PIT 635

I think you might have to do some detective work to put that to any use.

Some other random data points - first, most scratches:

HS Injury
A Peters 177 10
B Mcgrattan 146 25
W Belak 137 25
N Paetsch 135 8
P Bissonnette 120 2
P Harrold 120 0
S Macintyre 119 2
S Brookbank 118 3
D Drewiske 118 2
R Davison 114 4
D Meech 107 8
A Johnson 106 7
J Scott 104 4
C Janssen 102 16
M Walker 101 19
A Sulzer 98 14
D King 92 15
C Orr 92 10
M Weaver 92 9

Andrew Peters at the top of the list? No shock.

And what about reported concussions?

Concussion
2005-06 95
2006-07 52
2007-08 82
2008-09 111
2009-10 102
2010-11 209
2011-12 131

What are the odds that the number of concussions doubled in the NHL in the span of a couple of years? Basically zero? We are actually seeing increased awareness and reporting.

Verdict: The data we get from teams and the league seems very suspect at the moment. There's a small niche to be carved out by someone who's willing to pay attention to every game's injuries.

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Very suspect...

Am I right in thinking your data set comes from the ESPN boxscores (which are presumably from the official league ones)?

I remember when I first started looking at trying to collate man-games lost figures, the information looked completely unhelpful, mainly because far too many scratches were either not listed or did not identify whether due to injury or not. I ended up farming through the player profile pages on TSN instead, which looked like a much more reliable source of information (if still a bit flawed and more labour intensive).

The man-games by “reported injuries” above look way too low by comparison. My figures (still far from official) for 2008/09 through 2010/11 alone ranged from 498 (Phoenix) to 1,498 (Islanders) – inclusive of illnesses but still excluding personal reasons, suspensions and healthy scratches. The above also has Phoenix and the Islanders as bottom and top respectively, but some of the other comparisons are all over the map. Partly the different periods looked at, but I’d guess more an indication of huge variability in what teams have reported in the official numbers.

Springing Malik - the world's 9th favourite rarely updated UK-based Marek Malik tribute blog

by LW3H on Feb 13, 2012 2:36 PM EST reply actions  

oh that’s great. Do you post these in spreadsheet form instead of images?

by Brian Macdonald on Feb 13, 2012 5:07 PM EST up reply actions  

oops… i meant “Could you” not “Do you”

by Brian Macdonald on Feb 13, 2012 5:08 PM EST up reply actions  

It’d take a while, but not impossible.

Springing Malik - the world's 9th favourite rarely updated UK-based Marek Malik tribute blog

by LW3H on Feb 14, 2012 2:23 PM EST up reply actions  

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