Another way to look at the injury count

Thursday, April 09, 2009-2:02:am
/Andrew's Dallas Stars Page                            

When the Dallas Stars and Colorado Avalanche hit the ice Thursday night in Denver they are expected to have a combined 19 players out due to injury. The two teams also rank among the top six in the league in man-games lost to injuries this season. The question is are all man-games lost equal?

The Stars are tied for third in the league at 366 man-games lost but 70 of those games are Sergei Zubov, 62 are Brenden Morrow and 34 are Jere Lehtinen and 24 are Brad Richards. Those are some key players.

Colorado, which ranks 6th at 333 games lost, has lost Joe Sakic for 64 games, Adam Foote for 37 and Paul Stastny for 34.

There's probably no perfect way to quantify man-games lost, but we took a look at it in the terms of the cap costs of the players who were lost. In other words, 70 games lost for Zubov totaled $4.57 million in terms of a cap value lost to injury.

So how do the Stars stack up against some other teams as far when it comes to cap value lost to injuries. For our sample we took the five-hardest hit teams in the Western Conference - St. Louis, Dallas, Colorado, San Jose and Columbus - and figured their man games lost based on cap value. 

These figures aren't exact, but they are approximations. We didn't include every player who missed a game because of the flu or players who may have missed a game or two when it came to calculating the cap value lost.  Not all the information, which came from the pregame notes of the various teams, was complete as far as individual players for all teams. 

The hardest hit team? St. Louis. Why? Left wing Paul Kariya, center Andy McDonald and defensemen Eric Brewer and Erik Johnson missed a total of 237 games combined for a cap value lost of $12.8 million.

Those were key players for the Blues as well. McDonald is the No. 1 center, Kariya is a top six forward and led the team in points last season, Brewer led the team in ice time last season and Johnson was their top scoring defenseman. Throw in some of the other key injuries and we calculated that the Blues lost $14.4 million in cap value to injuries.

One note on the Blues. Johnson is an entry-level player and his cap hit, which is $3.7 million, is heavy on performance bonuses. His NHL compensation this season is $850,000. If you went strictly on compensation, the Stars would be harder hit than St. Louis.

As for the Stars, Zubov, Morrow, Lehtinen and Richards have missed a total of 190 games for a cap value lost of about $11.6 million. Throw in the injuries to players like Steve Ott, Toby Petersen and the host of others who have gone out recently, and the Stars have lost an estimated $13.7 million in cap value to injuries.

The team that was the least hit as far as cap value was San Jose. They did not have any high cap value players out for the season or even a majority of the season. They had a lot of players miss between 10 and 20 games.

If you break it down to the average cap value of the players lost to injury, the Stars were on top with an average of just under $3 million. The Blues were next with $2.5 million.

Here's a look at those five teams from the West, their man-games lost, the estimated cap value lost to injury and the average player value.

NHL man-games lost

Here's a look at the latest league-wide count of man-games lost to injury.