The Oilers Injuries In Cap Terms

by Derek Zona on Nov 7, 2009 3:30 PM PST in Analysis Comment 5 comments

I love microstats, especially when they are formed before our eyes, like Vic's Zonestart, or CHIP. From the excellent site Springing Malik comes CHIP, or Cap Hit of Injured Players. Like a Volcano rising from the ocean, CHIP appears before us to compare injuries not just by man games, but by cap hits. In a world without bad contracts, this would be the most ideal way to understand the impact of games lost to injury.

From the site:

The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2009/10 cap charge, then take the aggregate of these figures for each team and divide by 82. This indicator of value lost to a team by injury/illness is called CHIP (Cap Hit of Injured Players).

Scott brought up the extremely interesting tact of measuring this metric by using TOI/game, which would be outstanding, but I think this is interesting enough to go with for now.

The injury situation with the Oilers thus far has been bad and it's getting worse. At the time the article was published, the Oilers were second on the list in CHIP. Since then, Shawn Horcoff has gone down, Lubomir Visnovsky was sidelined with the flu, and now Ales Hemsky has a mysterious shoulder injury that may take him to the press box for a bit.

As long as Bob Luongo and Tweedledee are in Vancouver, they are going to stay on top. But if the Oilers keep finding themselves scratching fellas from the $4 million+ salary bucket, they're going to catch up quickly. On a team full of players that aren't NHL-capable yet, the guys that are able to compete are in that bucket. So not only will they find themselves leading the league in a nifty new stat, they'll find themselves scouting the lottery for next year.

Oiler fans should be raising their glasses and giving a silent "Na zdorovje" towards the Oilers for the foreseeable future.

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According to Hockeycentric, the Oilers will be missing $16,350,000 in cap from the ice tomorrow.

Editor of The Copper & Blue, and leader of The Cult Of Hartikainen.

by Derek Zona on Nov 7, 2009 7:07 PM PST reply actions 0 recs

Hey. Thanks for checking out the blog.

I think I did consider using TOI/game as the measure for player “value”, but decided against it. Can’t really remember why though – maybe the spread of values will be greater by using cap numbers (an $8m player won’t tend to play 8 times as much as a $1m player, for example).

It wouldn’t be too much extra work to work the extra numbers out, so I might see how it looks. Obvious problem is that you can’t value goalies comparably to skaters. And the name TOIPGIP would suck…

by LW3H on Nov 9, 2009 2:24 PM PST reply actions 0 recs

Indeed the name would suck. Bruce raised some valid complaints as well for guys that are out for the season or who have switched teams. I think it would be good to adjust it to include both TOI and Cap Hit. Say 50% of the “CHIP” value calculated by a “last 100 GP” TOI average and 50% calculated by Cap Hit. If a player has missed more than a full season divide by 2. If he misses another season divide by 2 again. And so on. I think a formula like that would do a better job of calculating the value of players lost but there’s two things about the current system that I know are much better than what I’ve kicked around above:

1. It’s simpler so people will understand it easily.
2. It’s a lot less work.

And those are important factors too.

by Scott Reynolds on Nov 10, 2009 8:45 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs

My "complaints"

I prefer ice time in many important respects, but not others. For sure it would be much trickier to apply. Here’s a few things I mentioned to the C&B writers the other day:

1) TOI isa floating average, whereas a cap hit is firm, so one would need an interactive database.
2) One would also need to be careful in situations like Sheldon Souray, who has an official avg. TOI of 19:18, consisting of these three games: 25:00, 25:20, 7:35, with the latter obviously being the game he was hurt. But in small sample sizes such things could make a huge difference.
3) More problematic still is the guys who have missed the whole year. What’s Marian Hossa’s avg. TOI? We know what his salary is.
4) If you lose a workhorse goalie, does he rack up the minutes at something approaching 60/G?

and a new one, 5) There are differences across positions generally. e.g. in Pittsburgh both Evgeni Malkin and Mark Eaton are 20-minute-a-game players. One of these guys will be a lot harder to replace.

Given Scott’s two excellent points which are strongly in favour of the CHIP method I say that’s a damn good starting point. Perhaps it could be refined, but the system as proposed is a good rough guide which is probably all we could expect — or need — from any system. Excellent work, LW3H!

Writer for The Copper & Blue and primary shareholder of Zorg Industries

by Bruce McCurdy on Nov 10, 2009 9:47 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs

Yeah, factor #2 is probably uppemost in my thinking…

I’ll try to do something around TOI when I’m next due to update the numbers (end of the month – too inefficient to do it more regularly, really). I think the Malkin/Eaton point was one of the main reasons I chose the other path. Some sort of hybrid could be more representative of “value”, but I’m always reluctant to introduce elements of subjectivity into things like this. So long as people are intelligent enough to recognise the limitations of CHIP, as you are, then I think it does what I was hoping for.

And for players who switch teams, I just allocate the CHIP number accordingly, i.e. the game missed goes next to whichever team the player was on at the time, so a player could contribute to the overall CHIP number for more than one team.

by LW3H on Nov 10, 2009 3:02 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs

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TOI/G:	Horcoff (19:25)	Gilbert (22:10)
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