There was probably a year when I didn’t have to decide whether Guillaume Brisebois missing time from the start of the season should count in the Canucks’ numbers, but I can’t remember when

Based on a highly analytical skim of the list, I'm 37% confident that Barkov's potential full-season absence would probably have the highest significance/unexpectedness rating of any player to miss a whole (regular) season since at least 2000/01

Have looked at this before but here's a quick plot of regular season MGL (excluding Covid-related absences) in the year of reaching the Cup final and the following year No strong pattern of getting hurt more the next year, though the three biggest outliers have all been since 2020

Regular season MGL totals for teams that made 2+ straight Cup Finals (since 00/01) and for the following season: DET 07/08: 205 / 205 / 316 PIT 07/08: 286 / 279 / 187 PIT 15/16: 318 / 287 / 176 TBL 19/20: 121* / 236* / 172 / 117 FLA 22/23: 236 / 145 / 131 / ? EDM 23/24: 60 / 217 / ?

Barkov is frequently injured but nothing that substantial since a knee injury ended his rookie season

If nothing else, hard to imagine the Panthers would even get close to already venturing Barkov being done for the year if the new LTIR rules weren’t in place

Jamie Benn’s career injury history Very little below the waist

Almost certainly won’t be the only cases but FWIW the only three occasions I have recorded as lung injuries causing a player to miss games: Marcus Johansson (10 in 18/19) Anthony Mantha (20 in 19/20) Logan Couture (1 in 21/22)

Last season's full absences now added to this chart Not unusually, all of those players were 31 or older

Updated plot showing the 36 players to have missed a full regular season (while under contract) since 00/01 and made it back to the NHL (Not counting Kane or Landeskog here yet until they play another regular season game. Toews is for his first absence - most recent one was out of contract.)

Updated leaderboard of games "missed" by injured players under contract who never played for the team (1/3) 398 Horton (TOR) 246 Seabrook (TBL) 216 Bolland (ARI) 208 Hossa (ARI) 184 Little (ARI) 164 Clarkson (VGK) Pronger (ARI) 107 Weber (ARI) 103 Voráček (ARI)

Raising the other eyebrow a year on

Leaning at a slightly greater angle given his unexpected comments today (whether genuine or compliance tap dancing)

Only 34 games missed to injury and 2 to illness in Anže Kopitar’s career to date

List of players who have signed with a new team then missed a whole season with injury is already very short, so potentially doing so for a second season (and a different injury) is probably creating a new list entirely

Teams running a contest to announce the most SOIR cases today, it seems

Early, tentative list of "retired" under contract cases going into 25/26: Couture (SJS) Ellis (PHI) Krug (STL) Price (SJS) Weber (CHI)

Only being a tenth-to-quarter-serious, but my understanding from reading far too many Canadiens fans’ comments about injury impacts over the past four years is that the Price trade will mean 82 fewer MGL which is worth a 15-win improvement in the standings

Nicklas Bäckström vs Niklas Bäckström

Amended final NHL injury summary for the 2024/25 regular season reflecting the technicality of retroactively removing "retired under contract" status from the seemingly still-active Nicklas Bäckström

Doesn’t happen often but if this comes to pass, probably enough to reverse his “retired under contract” status last season

Excuse the killer thumbnail here (bemused shrug) but the player career injury timeline dashboard type thing is now clean enough to make available There's a single player and two-player comparison view for limited boat floating satisfaction nhlinjuryviz.blogspot.com/2025/07/nhl-...

He's missed a fair amount of time for health reasons but credit to Rasmus Ristolainen, he's never missed a playoff game due to injury

Tidied up versions of the Sid vs Ovi career injury summaries

Frederik Andersen: Not a fan of playing in November and December specifically

Player injury history timeline views progressed far enough to be able to show that Mark Stone has: (a) Missed (only) two playoff R2 G5s twelve years apart (b) Missed regular season Game 82 on four occasions (two followed by not making the playoffs, two followed by...something else)

Think I've settled on the least ugly way to capture the round robin or prelim games in the bubble (stealing some space from the regular season games that were never played)

Today's incomplete project: Improved timeline view of player career injury summaries Sid vs Ovi here (Working on getting playoff absences added in a sensible way. Very unlikely to get zero-injury seasons included, since that'll mean adding full career histories to the database.)

This comparison is between regular season injuries in 2000/01 and 2024/25. The grey in the latter and completely absent from the former reflects non-disclosure (as I've previously covered, this might be partly due to data sourcing but team policies definitely changed since about 2009).

If you can ignore the difference in scale (one player cohort twice the size of the other), nothing here that suggests an obvious difference between the type/location of injuries suffered by forwards (chart 1) and defensemen (chart 2)

Work in progress in terms of user functionality and absolutely shamelessly copied from‬ @drhoa3.bsky.social but this is every NHL injury/illness absence since 2000/01 in bubble (bubbular?) form

Animated version of the MGL vs Points team histories

Nothing new but trying the year-by-year MGL histories since 2000/01 in video form (in absence of GIF capabilities)

Of the six players I classified as "retired" but under contract in the 24/25 season, three are now out of contract (Bäckström, Lehner, Poolman), two have one year left (Price, Weber) and one has two years left (Ellis)

The only players who might be worth 15 standings points are McDavid, the odd elite goalie season (unsustainably) and every Montreal player who was injured in 21/22 and 22/23

Games missed to injury/illness since Brad Marchand’s first full season in 10/11: 3-1-3-0-3-2-0-9-1-0 2-2-8-2-11 Will be interesting to see what happens in the second half of his career

FWIW Alex Pietrangelo has never missed more than 12 games to injury in a single season before now (a bit higher if you include illness)

NHL career injury history for Trevor Zegras

This year's playoff injury numbers added to to the MGL vs Wins and CHIP vs Wins charts here nhlinjuryviz.blogspot.com/2022/07/mgl-...

Florida’s 8 MGL in the playoffs is tied for second fewest by a Cup winner (with themselves last year) since 2000/01 The sprightly youngsters of the 2001/02 Red Wings had 5 MGL

Mildly of interest that this refers to the possibility of “yet another” concussion, given the Predators are the perennial kings of injury non-disclosure and I have Josi with only one recorded concussion back in 13/14. (Six other unspecified UBIs in his career.) swisshockeynews.ch/en/medical-f...

T.J. Oshie’s career injury history As previously noted, he missed 210 regular season games before getting to 1,000, which is at the rough end of the spectrum

Should’ve said I was talking about 82-game seasons, since rightly pointed out to me that Kucherov technically did it in 2021

Evander Kane definitely the only player since at least 00/01 (probably much further) to miss the whole regular season injured and score in the Cup Final

No great injury history in the NHL to speak of for Yanni Gourde before this season FWIW

Not saying it happens (or pays off) every year, but the Oilers had a comfortable increase in players sitting out with injury close to the end of the season (on top of knowing Kane was coming back). Less so for the Panthers but they did a bunch of resting not shown here.

Summary of player absences to injury/illness in the regular season head-to-head between the Oilers and Panthers

List of players to get hurt in (or during) the CF/SF round and miss the whole Cup Final series (since 2001): 24 Stecher EDM 23 Luostarinen FLA 20 Faksa DAL 19 Wagner BOS 18 Subban VGK 17 Kühnhackl PIT, Johansen NSH 16 Daley PIT 14 Talbot NYR 13 Campbell BOS 08 Chelios DET 03 Nieuwendyk NJD

Reinhart being out will be the Panthers' 3rd MGL to injury so far in the playoffs (through 15 games total) Other teams 5 or fewer MGL through Game 3 of the CF / SF since 2000/01: 1 STL 15/16 (17 games) 4 CAR 08/09 (17) 4 STL 18/19 (16) 4 SJS 15/16 (15) 5 DET 01/02 (14)