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:

And by scratch/health scratch:

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

Some other random data points – first, most scratches:

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

And what about reported concussions?

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.