Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Give Me Your Sick and Infirm

by Todd Maternowski

Howdy, hockey hombres! Here's hoping the driving rain, overcast skies and Stars' punchless powerplay performances don't have you singin' the backchecking blues:

The reason I love Mike Modano so

Is that he rolls his jelly likes he rolls his dough

Last week, we stepped back from the precipice and gazed deeply into the Abyss that is the 2008-09 season; this week, I was going to write my tri-annual column 'Eighty Things Less Pathetic Than the Dallas Stars' (#42: Watching a T-Rex trying to pleasure itself), but in light of the Stars' recent four-game no-points streak, it's time to get down and dirty about the reality of this season's situation.

Already, the fans are writing this season off, saying that nine games presents zero chance of making up four points in the standings, calling for the collective heads of Dave Tippett, Brett Hull and Tom Hicks, and generally tearing up their season tickets in disgust. These are obviously the same people who, when they see a guy walk down the street and get hit by lightning, loudly exclaim that that guy "sucks". It's not exactly fair to place blame --as it had been in the past-- because the Stars were not playing with a full deck at any point this year. And in the New NHL, where the talent difference between the top and bottom teams is razor-thin, that is not something to be taken lightly.

By one rough estimate, the Stars have lost the seventh-most man-games to injury of any team in the NHL, trailing just the Islanders, Blues, Flyers, Capitals, Panthers and Penguins, and just ahead of the Lightning. Fair enough: but why are some of those teams seemingly unaffected by the conga-line to the training room, while others are languishing in the bottom of their conferences?

I posit the notion that man-games are not a specific enough statistic. An AHL call-up with less than five games in his not-so-promising NHL career going down with a knee injury for 60 games is not the same as losing, say, a team captain who is also an All-Star. So I went through these teams and, using the twin sisters of Science and Reason, came to a starting conclusion: losing important players to long-term injuries has a negative effect on a team.

For example, the bulk of the Stars' injuries this season happened to Sergei Zubov (63 games), Brenden Morrow (55 games), Joel Lundqvist (35 games), Jere Lehtinen (34 games), Steve Ott (16 games), Brad Richards (17 games), Landon Wilson (25 games) and Toby Petersen (16 games), amongst others. So while those players combined for 261 games, the all-stars on the roster were lost for a total of 185. And I'm not even including Phillipe Boucher in that figure. Compare that to the other allegedly "injury-riddled" NHL clubs:

NY Islanders: 87 (Mostly Weight and DiPietro)

St. Louis Blues: 143 (Kariya, Brewer and McDonald)

Philadelphia Flyers: 64 (Briere mostly, but 3-5 apiece for Richards, Gagne and Timonen)

Washington Capitals: 121 (Clark, Semin, Green, Kozlov and Federov)

Florida Panthers: 11 (McCabe.. hell, throw in Stillman and Horton and you still get just 50)

Pittsburgh Penguins: 154 (Gonchar, Whitney, Boucher, Satan, Sykora and Crosby)

Tampa Bay Lightning: 75 (Smith, Roberts, Malone)

I realize I'm likely forgetting some key players in there, but if you look at the numbers you start to see a pattern: the Flyers, for example, may be closing in on 450 man-games due to injury, but ask yourself if they're really hurting when one-time AHL call-ups blow out their knees after three shifts (strangely --or not so strangely, come to think of it-- the Isles and Lightning have lost next to no important players out of their mammoth list of injured scions). Of all the most snakebitten teams, the Stars, Penguins, Blues and Capitals have the biggest excuses to whine. How great would Detroit be if they were missing Zetterberg, Lidstrom and Rafalski for 160 games? The Bruins without Chara, Savard, Wheeler and Lucic for 140?

Short answer = Probably Not Quite As Good.

The scary thing about injuries? They're likely the result of team dynamics more than freak tendon-snaps and MCL tears. Teams like Detroit that play tightly together rarely seem to have huge injury problems (altho that could just be the perception): it's when a player doesn't trust that his linemate is doing the right thing, that he gets out of his game and puts his knees/wrists/groins at risk. So maybe the Avery signing, which obliterated team chemistry from the very start of the year, had an even bigger impact than the Stars will care to admit?

That's it for this week's statistic-heavy Cupcheck. Tune in next week when I return to sweeping generalizations based on unfounded opinion, as I dive deep into the dark depths of depravity, discussing dastardly deeds in Detroit's dank dungeons. Damn.

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