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Man Games Lost: Vancouver Canucks top of the class for team injuries |
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Today, a topic that never seems to fade far from view in Vancouver: injuries.
Man Games Lost released their latest NHL graphic on Wednesday. We're not over-reacting: the Canucks are now easily the league's most injured team over the last nine years.
CORRECTION: The number of games lost to injury is graphed against teams' number of wins over that same period. In that department, Vancouver is ranked right in the middle of the pack, largely thanks to those Presidents' Trophy years at the beginning of the timeframe.
Take a look at how the numbers have trended over the past two seasons. In 2017, the Canucks were only about the 11th most-injured team over the previous eight seasons.
Last week, I linked to an article where I talked to Patrick Kane and his off-ice trainer, Ian Mack of Tomahawk Science, about the work they've done over the last year to try to optimize Kane's body for peak performance, and to keep injuries to a minimum.
Their work has paid off so far. At age 30, Kane enjoyed the most productive season of his career, finishing third in NHL scoring with 110 points. He also hit a career high in ice time, and he only missed one game all year—here in Vancouver last Halloween, when he was sick.
As Mack told me about how he focused on improving Kane's mobility, he said his principles can be applied to all different types of players—not just the shifty scorers.
"How can we help them from a body mechanics standpoint?" he mused. "To unlock either the ability to skate faster, or be able to get lower and contract their muscles better or stay more stable throughout their entire season, or just to make sure they're as symmetrical as possible, to stay away from injuries?"
I asked Mack what type of approach he'd take, for example, with a big defenseman:
"A good defenseman comes in and he says he needs to be able to move better laterally. Well, we can definitely help him do that. He needs to be able to be able to get lower so that he can push off better in his skate—we can do that. We can train his fuel systems differently so that he can recover better, because some of those defensemen, they play 26 minutes a night, they play a ton. So we have to make sure they're well-conditioned, in general."
Side note: Speaking of conditioning, did you notice the Carolina Hurricanes waaaaaay over there in the 'least-injured' section of the graph at the top of the page? They've had their share of issues in these playoffs, but as they rolled over the New York Islanders in Round 2, players talked about how their conditioning was a team strength that helped them stay at the top of their game even after their gruelling first-round series against Washington.
During his playing days, Rod Brind'Amour was always known as one of the fittest players in the league. Hence, his 'Rod the Bod' nickname. He hasn't let up since retirement. Apparently he even went through the preseason fitness testing with his players at the beginning of this year—and passed, at age 48.
Brind'Amour's only in his first year as head coach but he has been with the Hurricanes ever since he hung up his skates in 2010, as director of player development for one year, then as assistant coach.
Just as the 'Canes deep defense has quietly been a competitive advantage for the last few years that is now paying off for them, I feel like Brind'Amour's leadership in fitness and conditioning has also helped the players on the roster.
"There's traumatic injuries that we can't do much about," said Ian Mack, when I asked what he can do to help NHL owners maximize the value of their most important assets, their players.
Chris Tanev is almost always a traumatic-injury guy. Search his name and the words "broken" or "fractured" and you get a snapshot of some of his greatest hits:
I love Tanev's commitment to competing—and it blows my mind to think that for as much as he's sidelined, he tries to play through practically everything. He was so low-key good when he first joined the Canucks that I always felt a responsibility to support him, but I can understand the thinking of the folks who say that he should be traded because he'll never be able to stay healthy. I guess at this point, if I was Jim Benning, that would be a tough decision that I'd consider making, depending on what the alternative might be.
One of Ian Mack's players also got knocked off track by a traumatic injury this year. Chicago-area native Connor Carrick spent last summer training beside Kane and got off to a decent start this season with Dallas, but broke his foot at the end of October.
By the time he was healthy again, Dallas coach Jim Montgomery had gotten comfortable with the defensemen he'd been using, so Carrick had a tough time getting back into the lineup. He was eventually moved to New Jersey at the trade deadline and finished the season strong, hitting a career high with nearly 20 minutes of ice time per game with the Devils, including power-play time. Still just 25, it'll be interesting to see if Carrick can finally lock down a steady role as an NHL regular next season.
Mack says the injuries that he and his team can help prevent are things like "groin pulls, adductor strains, shoulder injuries. A lot of those, we can do a pretty good job of stacking the deck to make sure those guys get hurt less.
"Usually it's not from specifically making one area stronger or making one area more mobile," he continued. "A lot of time, it's trying to get them back to what we call neutral or symmetrical.
"The sport they play is very one-sided. Patrick (Kane) plays lefty, so he's in that position and he's playing that direction on repeat for the last 25 years for — I don't know how many practice shots he's taken, maybe 10 million?
"So we have 10 million, if you want to call it, sets and reps, He did 10 million reps, going in one direction.
"For us, we don't want to feed into that imbalance. Traditionally, in our field, people would be like 'He shoots that direction, so we need to make him stronger, going in that direction.'
"Well, maybe you need to make him stronger going in that direction, but maybe you need to correct the imbalance that he's getting from doing all those reps on one side. We want our guys to be stable and mobile and we want them to be able to have the majority of their range on both sides and we want them to be able to control their range.
"I think injury prevention is at the forefront of what we're doing right now, and the more data collection that we can do on our end with it, the more movement analysis and assessment we can do, the less injuries happen.
"You saw what happened in Los Angeles this year—LeBron James pulled his groin. I don't know how much that cost the Lakers financially; I don't even know how they could put a number on that."
We don't know what goes on behind the scenes with the Canucks' medical staff. But if sports science staffs are now being evaluated based on their ability to keep players healthy, the data suggests that a different approach in Vancouver might be worth trying, to see if it can yield better results.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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