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.