The Injury Report (part I)

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DetroitGM
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The Injury Report (part I)

Post by DetroitGM »

As some of you will know, I've been curious about what the "injury prone" stat actually does and how it works -- does a 42 mean the player is less likely to get injured or more? If they do get injured, will they be out longer or shorter? Why do I feel the need to ask a third question?

So I went back - I had previously downloaded some old EHEC save files (they're in the server that hosts all the data for the website) and, using the 'histories.ehm' files, found 1305 injuries spanning from September 1st, 2009, to June 1st, 2021 (obviously I haven't included this season - also the first file I have is from the 2010-11 season, so it's possible that I'm missing a few players who retired after the 09-10 season). It is also worth remembering that this is only accounting for injuries that show up in the histories.ehm files, so day-to-day injuries are not included and the shortest injury length was "around two weeks".

Length:
The most common injury length is "more than a month", accounting for 355 or 27%, followed by "around two weeks", "almost a month", and "a couple of months", in that order. Interestingly, indefinitely (96, 7%) has happened more than "at least 4/5/6 months" combined (91). There were also 5 players who received indefinite injuries and were forced to retire, along with a 6th retirement that I'm uncertain of (the player ID is 0000).

Type:
Injury types are fairly even for the most part, the most common is ankle (162, 12%) and lowest are both wrist and chest (116, 9%), not that it likely matters at all. There are also 8 unknown injuries, because there is no text where the injury should be, while, somewhat interestingly, 57 (4%) of injuries came during training, as opposed to during games.

Individuals:
I haven't yet matched up player ID# with the players themselves or with their injury rating (my ultimate goal of this), but I can say that 525 ID#s show up just once, 163 twice, 74 three times, 36 four times, and 15 five times. If you count that up, you will notice that leaves two ID#s.

(I will add, I put together an arbitrary estimate system for how long a player would be injured)
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One of them is not very surprising - Joe Pavelski, currently with Ottawa, has been injured 6 different times, in 2010, 2011, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2020, for a total of around 15.5 years. The thing is, he is 37, he's been around long enough for that to make some sense.

The other one I'd frankly not heard of and his age doesn't remotely explain it. Nashville's Steven Shipley. At just 29 years old, he has been injured 7 times - in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020, and 3 times in 2018 (albeit once in the 17-18 season and twice in 18-19) for a combined total of around 16.75 months.

There are two other names of note - the player with the most time injured and the player with the worst injuries.

The first of those is the Islander's Wojtek Wolski, who has suffered five injuries amounting to some 25 months total - "more than a month" in 2009 and 2011, "more than six months" in 2017, and indefinitely in 2010 and 2014. Looking at those years I would say he is due for another injury :S

The player with the worst injuries, on the other hand, is retired - Jonathan Merrill suffered a career ending injury in late January 2021, just the third time he received an injury in the EHEC. Meanwhile his first injury (in 2012) was for "at least four months" and the second (in 2018) was indefinitely, so I fully believe he would have died had he been allowed to return from his announced retired 🙃

"Conclusion":
So like I said, I haven't looked at "injury prone" values yet. But what I will note is the four players named above have (or had, in the case of Merrill) values of 65, 60, 65, and 66 respectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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TorontoGM
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Re: The Injury Report (part I)

Post by TorontoGM »

Interesting read.

I've always wanted to go back and tally up my teams injuries because it felt like for a long time that we were incredibly durable and/or lucky when it came to injuries, especially longer term injuries. It would also be interesting to see because I basically had everyone on PHY training for years, I wonder if that played a part.
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AvalancheGM
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Re: The Injury Report (part I)

Post by AvalancheGM »

Very interesting. You would think those four players would have very low or very high IJ ratings (depending on which end is which). Ratings in the 60s don't really help us arrive at any conclusions.
The Colorado Avalanche - missing the playoffs every year since EHEC began
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NYRNYRNYR
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Re: The Injury Report (part I)

Post by NYRNYRNYR »

Very cool stuff. The fact everyone was in 60s IJ makes it seem like that is less likely the factor, but who knows yet. It's certainly a good sample size since its a decade worth of seasons.
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