The Pittsburgh Penguins dropped another decision this time to the Carolina Hurricanes by a score of 5-2.
The Penguins are 3-5-2 in their last ten games and while they aren’t at risk of losing their playoff spot they are at risk of losing the New York Islanders as a first round matchup. While the Islanders are a very good team I would argue that they would be the more desirable opponent than the New York Rangers who are firing on all cylinders.
The results for the Penguins have not been encouraging but I will leave this here:
Perron-Crosby-Dupuis
Kunitz-Malkin-Hornqvist
Winnik-Spaling-Comeau
Bennett-Sutter-Downie
Lapierre-Adams
Martin-Letang
Ehrhoff-Maatta
Pouliot-Lovejoy
Scuderi-Cole
Fleury
Greiss
This is the hypothetical Pittsburgh Penguins organizational depth chart.
In a salary cap league it is a tough pill to swallow when you are down Evgeni Malkin, Patric Hornqvist, Pascal Dupuis, Christian Ehrhoff, and Olli Maatta. Quite a starting lineup there.
Now we can argue that every team has injuries and that they shouldn’t be an excuse which is a fine message if you are the head coach. But for people that aren’t at the team level you can apply logic and understand that injuries can kill the best intentions of a general manager in a salary cap league.
Luck plays a huge role in an organization’s ability to compete for the Stanley Cup. It isn’t enough to build a great roster. You need to hope that your team is clicking on the PDO front during the small sample sizes of playoff series. You also need to be healthy. Two things that aren’t always in the control of teams.
You can’t plan for injuries and I’m not sure what you can do as an organization to avoid them.
If you don’t think injuries matter that much check out the data since the 2008-09 season, the last year the Penguins were in the Stanley Cup Final.
You can see Pittsburgh is not on the proper end of this chart. The top ten teams in man games lost only have two Stanley Cup Final appearances combined and they are the ninth and tenth ranked teams (Vancouver and Philadelphia). They only have three Conference Finals appearances amongst the group (Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh).
The bottom ten teams in man games lost have 14 Conference Finals appearances. They have seven Stanley Cup Final appearances and have the past five Stanley Cup Champions.
Here is the data for raw man games lost from this year:
Once again Pittsburgh finds themselves on the wrong end of the chart.
At the
Man Games Lost website they have come up with a formula that weighs the man games that each team loses based on the quality of player. They define it as:
Time Missed Impact To Team (TMITT) is a metric that attempts to quantify the impact of a player not playing for their team due to injury. A higher TMITT number equals a higher impact of injured players to the team. TMITT utilizes a skater’s average time on ice (ATOI) or minutes played for goalies, the number of games missed due to injury, the number of games played by their team, and the number of games that the player has played in (necessary due to players who aren’t on the team’s roster or IR at all times i.e. AHL call-ups). Using the number of games a player has played in for TMITT also devalues players who miss more than half the season since their teams are better able to adapt to their loss as the season progresses.
TMITT-skater = (PlayerGamesPlayed x ATOI x PlayerGamesInjured) / TeamGamesPlayed
TMITT-goalie = (PlayerGamesPlayed x MinutesPlayed x PlayerGamesInjured) / TeamGamesPlayed
Here are the 2014-15 rankings based on TMITT:
Interesting to note on this chart is that former healthy super powers Los Angeles and Boston are fighting for their playoff lives in 2014-15 as they are finally being visited by the injury bug.
Pittsburgh is still a top five team (not in the good way).
The fact is if your team is injured frequently your chances of winning are diminished. Injuries are random and this isn't always fair, but it is the reality. Given that the NHL is a salary cap league teams only have so much flexibility to replace players who are out injured (especially the talented ones).
Sometimes your favorite team doesn’t need to try harder or show more heart, they just need to get lucky on the injury front.
Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.
Thanks for reading!
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