Injuries Correlating to Standings

Finding "man-games lost" lists is an incredibly hard feat. You can be searching Google forever. I found a couple pieces from different dates in recent past and will try and piece a thesis on the evidence. Jason Gregor was wondering about this on his show the other day, I felt inclined take a good ol' gander at it.

Starting off with 2007/08, taken from Mirtle's old blog, the stats line goes...

SICK. Thing to note, this isn't a full 82 to games, this was done on March 18th, 2008. Teams still had 10 games, give or take, left to play, but this is a pretty big sample size to draw a conclusion... This is pretty damn scattered, this shows us that teams need good depth to succeed, but the severity of injuries in the top 10 teams is a lot less apparent. There are some flukes here too though, Atlanta and St. Louis were really healthy, but were just brutal. Pittsburgh was 9th in injuries, but managed to be 4th place at the current time. Let's move along, shall we?

The Hockey News had an article done in 2009/2010.

Much more stagnant. The "lines of best fit" are done by me eye-balling them, for the record. This is only 10 teams as well, but the whole 82 game season. Like I said earlier, this data is hard as hell to find, maybe someone knows where to go and could give me a shout as to where. This graph only contains the top 10 most injured teams, too. Three top 10 placing teams and 5 bottom 10 teams with the other just outside the top 10. Hmm....

Here is Mirtle's 2010/2011 data.

Rk	Teams	GP	MGL	MGL/G
1	NY Islanders (27)	74	512	6.92
2	Colorado (29)	72	385	5.35
3	New Jersey (23)	72	373	5.18
4	Minnesota (21)	73	363	4.97
5	Calgary (17)	75	318	4.24
6	Nashville (10)	73	307	4.21
7	Vancouver (1)	73	306	4.19
8	Pittsburgh (4)	73	303	4.15
9	St. Louis (20)	73	291	3.99
10	NY Rangers (18)	74	294	3.97
11	Florida (28)	73	273	3.74
12	Detroit (6)	73	232	3.18
13	Edmonton (30)	73	221	3.03
14	Washington (2)	73	218	2.99
15	Philadelphia (3)	72	197	2.74
16	Columbus (24)	73	192	2.63
17	Montreal (14)	74	194	2.62
18	Buffalo (15)	72	177	2.46
19	Ottawa (26)	73	176	2.41
20	Anaheim (9)	72	166	2.31
21	Toronto (22)	74	166	2.24
22	Atlanta (25)	72	156	2.17
23	Tampa Bay (8)	72	153	2.13
24	Los Angeles (12)	73	147	2.01
25	San Jose (5)	74	148	2.00
26	Dallas (16)	72	128	1.78
27	Phoenix (11)	75	110	1.47
28	Chicago (13)	72	97	1.35
29	Boston (7)	72	92	1.28
30	Carolina (19)	72	56	0.78

Once again, pretty close from first to last, but that top 15 is still healthier than the back 15. There's always at least one back 5 team that reaches the north pole in injuries, obviously contributing to their success in the standings.

There was a post I found that digs back deeper and covers a few more years that could help too, but the change over from the 2006 playoffs to now is way to severe. Some teams may only have a few players, if any at all left. Just look at the '06 Oilers to now. The data gathered here shows that injuries happen to teams of all different flavor's. The good teams will survive because of good depth and the bad teams will not; see 2011/12 Oilers. Looking at the "line of best fit" on each graph tells us that injuries trend upward as we scroll down the league standings. Why is that, I wonder? Those teams suffer major injuries to crucial players? Or could it be something like chasing the puck too often, leading to more physical contact and more miles on the body?

Maybe that genius, Ken Holland, knows...