The 25-26 Injury Thread

[donlever]

But I say that in a League that strives for parity, small percentages add up.

Another conversation arises from the ether.

Does a league that strives for parity manipulate draft lotteries?

[Ronning's Ghost]

But I say that in a League that strives for parity, small percentages add up.

Another conversation arises from the ether.

Does a league that strives for parity manipulate draft lotteries?

"League integrity?" might merit it's own thread.

[Carl Yagro]

Integritty? How you spell?


Photo caption: Trevor Linden Dead Inside

[Madcombinepilot]

This has morphed into one of the best conversations this board has seen in years.

MCP approves!


So, while not a spreadsheet guy, I would ask the question of where that fancy chart lands us if you factor out everyone who makes less than league minimum. This would give us a better view of how expensive injuries hurt us more, and conversely, how the depth of an organization holds up…

but would have Florida running away with it.

Edit..
where is Tciso and his math brain??

This thread needs “Tciso Math”

[Blob Mckenzie]

As long as Tciso has nothing to do with choosing our Olympic team.

[Cornuck]

This thread needs “Tciso Math”

And a Per spreadsheet!

But yes, the data is out there, and the 'CHIP' (Cap Hit of Injured Players) factor, like Donnie said, is key.

[5thhorseman]

So the 24/25 league average was 206 man lost games and 26 actual injuries.

And the Canucks were 228 and 28.

Guess boils down to who is injured ….

For sure.

There's also the 'advanced stats' of salary lost vs just man games. Having Jett Woo out vs Chytil is a huge difference.

So I'd say that the more instructive way to look at the 24/25 numbers is a Cap Hit of Injured Players (CHIP) of over $12 million, vs. a league median of under $10 million. The difference is more than they paid Blueger, and close to the lingering damage of the O.E.L.... situation.

Or you could say it's only around 2%, and 2% more points would still have seen them out of the playoffs. But I say that in a League that strives for parity, small percentages add up.

Yes, you're basically normalizing injury days lost with player value, using cap hit as a proxy to get a usable metric. The only question is, is this noise, i.e within the standard deviation, or is it anomalous? Also, there's a t-value or p-value we're supposed to know. Where's Topper?

[Ronning's Ghost]

Yes, you're basically normalizing injury days lost with player value, using cap hit as a proxy to get a usable metric. The only question is, is this noise, i.e within the standard deviation, or is it anomalous? Also, there's a t-value or p-value we're supposed to know. Where's Topper?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Like I said, I think the rosters vary too much from year to year for these to rise to the level of statistical significance on a team basis. You'd have to work from every player's individual history, and then work backwards to construct the roster. But then you lose any effects that might arise from travel miles or training staff. I don't feel like doing any of that unless the Canucks are paying me.

I predict that if Topper were here, he'd say that the sample size is too small to extract meaningful signal from the noise, just as he said of most of the "fancy" stats. But I suspect Topper is strictly a parametric guy, and I wonder (not enough to do it, mind you) what Bayesian Statistics would say. Better, of course, that Topper say it for himself. Maybe this will bait him back.

I think that this data passes the basic sniff test -- my "prior" would be that relatively expensive players EP40, Hughes, Demko, and Chytil would miss more than the league average numbers of games for their positions. But then we see weird stuff: Chris Tanev couldn't put together a full season in Vancouver, and has been an iron man since he left. Sami Salo was as robustly constructed a hockey player as you are likely to find, but we know his history, too. We'd expect play style to be a factor, and that can change over the course of a career.

In conclusion, I suspect that the Canucks are fragile and/or brave/bold/reckless more than they are unlucky, but I am unwilling to put in the hard work to prove it. {gestures vaguely at a website}

[donlever]

Speaking of in conclusion I would add/state the following.

Drawing from a Sports Science perspective it seems definitive that heightened travel requirements, especially this season being an Olympic year therefore creating a compressed schedule, would be a precursor to enhanced injury issues for those at the top end of the "air miles" ladder (us).

Travel itself, as stated above, would appear problematic but lets add additonal factors to the proverbial car ride to the airport/airline flight/bus to the hotel such as those that are listed below:

*impact on the human body from the travel itself - we are not designed to do this to the degree pro athletes do - I have traveled a good deal for business in my life and, while far from a pro athlete, I take care of myself and am/have generally always been in excellent health and physical condition - the simple act of travel/hotels results in a less than 100% overall "how do I feel" status each and every time

*pro hockey is obviously a physical game, body/muscle/mental recovery in an airplane or a hotel bed is not ideal - the lack of "real" oxygen, vitamin D combined with air conditions in jets are not conducive to what would be considered the consummate recovery atmosphere

*heightened travel requirments and condensed schedules equate to lack of practice time - one warms up before lifting heavy weights for instance...the lack of practice means game speed without practice buffers which can increase chance of injury - 0 - 100 in one second as opposed to 4 for instance, guys that play big minutes - Hughes/EP as an example, are, via simple mathematical equation, more likely to get injured and therefore recover less rapidly due to the above which would then be seemingly problematic towards team success

*time zones

Now we all know the team and it's training/medical staff do everything they can to streamline process and mitigate issues (Corn noted the old Hyperbaric Chamber earlier) but demands on the human body are what they are and end result is end result.

As an aside it is perhaps interesting that the greatest success this team had this Millennium (outside of the obvious talent and team structure at the time) is when team power brokers went the extra mile to reduce travel impact by studying sleep patterns/mindfullness/meditation in order to maximize rest and recovery for the players as optimally as possible.

[Cornuck]

Travel this year (LINK):

1. Dallas Stars............18 road trips.....50,601.70 miles.....40 time zone changes
2. San Jose Sharks.......15 road trips.....50,348.20 miles.....40 time zone changes
3. Vancouver Canucks...14 road trips.....48,378.00 miles.....43 time zone changes
4. Nashville Predators...17 road trips.....47,581.10 miles.....51 time zone changes (edit: added for more reference)
5. Colorado Avalanche...21 road trips....47,235.30 miles.....42 time zone changes (edit: added for more reference)
.
32.New York Islanders...17 road trips.....28,477.30 miles......20 time zone changes
.
League average..........17 road trips.....40,321.24 miles......33 time zone changes

[donlever]

So add that intel to my post above.

14 trips for the Canucks....fewest in the upper tier, group, longer trips, more drag on the human condition, more injury and/or lack of recovery opportunity....

43 time zone changes...highest in the group.

Similar sentiment.

[Ronning's Ghost]

Travel this year (LINK):

1. Dallas Stars............18 road trips.....50,601.70 miles.....40 time zone changes
2. San Jose Sharks.......15 road trips.....50,348.20 miles.....40 time zone changes
3. Vancouver Canucks...14 road trips.....48,378.00 miles.....43 time zone changes
4. Nashville Predators...17 road trips.....47,581.10 miles.....51 time zone changes (edit: added for more reference)
5. Colorado Avalanche...21 road trips....47,235.30 miles.....42 time zone changes (edit: added for more reference)
.
32.New York Islanders...17 road trips.....28,477.30 miles......20 time zone changes
.
League average..........17 road trips.....40,321.24 miles......33 time zone changes

So, combining all those data (using the 2024-25 season for injury stats so as to minimize the inadequacy of the sample size that is one of the bigger limitations on our analysis, and assuming that the relative rigors of the travel schedule do not vary significantly from season to season), we can note that Dallas Stars, San Jose Sharks, and Colorado Avalanche all took a bigger CHIP hit than the Canucks, while (from the bottom part of Corn's list in the link) the Habs, Devils, Red Wings, Sabres, and leaves all took a smaller one. (The Islanders and the Predators are outliers, but we'd actually expect a larger number of outliers than that in such noisy data.)

1. Without doing the hard work of actually running the numbers, it appears that the difference in travel schedules is sufficient to account for the difference in injury rates, without invoking differences in roster composition or training staff skill.

2. If the League were really interested in parity, it should offer the teams that have to travel more some kind of compensating advantage, such as slightly better lottery odds at the draft.

As an aside it is perhaps interesting that the greatest success this team had this Millennium (outside of the obvious talent and team structure at the time) is when team power brokers went the extra mile to reduce travel impact by studying sleep patterns/mindfullness/meditation in order to maximize rest and recovery for the players as optimally as possible.

Actual achievements (and lack thereof) notwithstanding, the thing I liked most about that regime was a willingness to at least try to innovate to eke out an advantage (or mitigate a disadvantage) somewhere. That gave me more hope than "meat and potatoes". And it seems to that for most of their existence, a significant part of what this franchise has been selling is hope for the future.

[Meds]

I would like to see an analysis on the roster construction/play style of those teams with heavier travel.

I can only look at Vancouver for my own observations, but we’ve been a small(ish)/soft team for decades now. That type of team seems like it would likely face more injuries when combining the increased susceptibility due to mileage with the facing of heavier teams on the road.

[donlever]

Yeah...that would be a part of it as well....I wonder how the '94 team would have compared analytically.

I'd like to see how the stats differ when Washington is included in the roadie.

[Ronning's Ghost]

I would like to see an analysis on the roster construction/play style of those teams with heavier travel.

Hardest to quantify yet. You could do size, but I think that would be a weak proxy. Even more so for PiMs and play style.

I can only look at Vancouver for my own observations, but we’ve been a small(ish)/soft team for decades now. That type of team seems like it would likely face more injuries when combining the increased susceptibility due to mileage with the facing of heavier teams on the road.

I'm not saying I know how that would work, but there is reason to expect potential for surprise. People have been experimenting with game theory strategies with computer programs for some time, now. Very aggressive computer programs seldom do well, because everyone else winds up being aggressive with them, and sometimes they run into each other, too.

https://www.evolbio.mpg.de/3800886/prop ... strategies

So, taking it back to hockey, if you're a big, bruising team, you're usually trying to play a big, bruising game -- even against other big, bruising teams. And some of the smallish/soft teams will choose to try to match some of your physicality just to avoid getting psyched out, even if they're going to come out on the short end of that. On the other hand, sometimes smallish/soft teams will succeed in turning the game into a skating contest, and you could hurt yourself trying to keep up. And the smallish/soft teams will play some games against each other, and then play a less contact-intensive game, which might be expected to have fewer injuries. So the only advantage the big, bruising team carries into the season (and playoffs) is an expected better ability to weather more intense and frequent contact. When weighed against the fact that we would also expect them to have to weather more of that, it's not obvious to me that the balance would shake out to an advantage -- or a significant one, where the effects we are observing are relatively small. Back when there were goons, they were usually highly injured players, because they were expected to fight the other goons.

It would be advantageous from this perspective to be a team that could be effective playing any type of game, but I think we would have expected that anyway, irrespective of any injury effects.

An embittered Vancouver fan might suggest that a lot of it comes down to officiating style.

[Edited one time to try to improve the flow.]