Injuries and durability

One of the things I wanted to use preseason for was to test the effect of increased injuries. So far I am quite happy with it as while there have been a fair few injuries only 4-6 games, most of them have been very minor with each player affected out minimal games with only a few missing multiple games (Yes I know Semin missed 4 Leafy!)

One of the things this has confirmed however is that DU has a pretty big impact on these injuries with most injuries coming from guys with a lower DU rating. There have been a few exceptions to this but not too many.

I have a couple of suggestions on how to approach injuries in the regular season and I would like you to vote for one or offer a suggestion if you have an idea yourself. It is a difficult one to address as while I don't want the farm teams getting over run with injuries over the season I also don't want the teams that paid attention to DU being penalised by loosing any advantage they gained from doing this.

For the option of increasing lower DU's and decreasing higher ones I am trying to make injuries a slightly more level playing field and it becomes a little more 'luck of the draw'.

This will be done as follows:
DU: 50-59 = increase 15%
DU: 60-69 = increase 10%
DU: 70-79 = increase 5%
DU: 80-89 = remains the same
DU: 90-99 = 5% decrease

One more thing to note, the injuries are more apparent in preseason because of the crowded schedule. I will be trying to ensure that there are sufficient breaks between games in the regular season so a lot of minor injuries won't have much of an effect.

I would be interested to see how having extra off days would work, if our schedule was more like an NHL schedule with several days inbetween games when there is a break. It might solve a lot of the day to day stuff we've been getting. Increasing and decreasing values is interesting but more complicated. It think we need to figure out where the value is based on how many injuries we are getting and what we feel is right, if 60 minimum is the worst possible situation we could expect that would be fine. The only other issue is if having 60 DU will allow rookies to progress their DU to a realistic level or if we will end up with all 99 DU rookies.

If I modify the DU ratings I will remove it from the rerates as like you said it will throw it all out. I would look to try and keep DU as a fairly uniform thing and balance it against the level of injuries in the sim. This would mean it could hit almost any player and removes the 'injury prone' player but it might be the fairest way to deal with it at the moment.

Extra days off has nothing to do with injuries just exhaustion. DU only affects injuries while the number of minutes played affects the exhaustion levels. Both are shown under a players condition but the sim treats them differently. I have increased the level of effect high minutes played has on players. With the condensed schedule we see it more.

Yeh but extra days will allow for more recovery on day to day injuries, a 4 day injury becomes a 1 game injury instead of 2/3.

I like your idea homer

Paddywan wrote:Yeh but extra days will allow for more recovery on day to day injuries, a 4 day injury becomes a 1 game injury instead of 2/3.

Sorry misunderstood your point. You are right and I never intended to have the regular season the same as preseason, I have said to a few people the problem with a lot of auto rosters being done is because of a much tighter schedule for preseason.

I didn't realise last year that I could keep making schedules to my hearts content before starting the season so went with the first one it created. I will be looking over the schedules to break it up because I don't like having some teams play 4-5 days on the trot.

Sounds good I see no problem with the same amount of games per actual days if we want to keep the length of seasons the same just have more rest days.

I've had two goaltending injuries so far and the players in this position seem to tend to have low DU. I say put it up.

I think it was Jonzee's farm team last night that saw one player get a sore left knee, and another get a sore right knee

Make that 3 goaltenders! Clearly something needs to be done about players with low DU. Otherwise we're all going to need 10 goalies on our rosters to get us through the season!

Agree with Ronnie. Considering there is now a cap on rosters we need to increase durability, otherwise we will see a lot of 'unknown players' populating rosters this season.

I have increased the goalie DU to 50 the same as the players as I had left them at 40 to see how it affects them.

I don't think we will see that many injuries compared to preseason thanks to bigger breaks between games and a higher DU for goalies.

If it is an issue for goalies more than players I can always increase the DU for them as a basic level.

Just a couple of numbers to point out that makes me think the level of injuries are not too bad.

Pro injuries in total: 43
Pro goalies injured: 14 (32.6%)

Farm injuries in total: 69
Farm goalies injured: 25 (36.2%)

As I mentioned I expected a larger number of goalie injuries thanks to the DU ratings so it will be something I will monitor. Raising the DU should see the number of goalies injured drop considerably.

Also the level of injuries shouldn't be as bad in regular season.

If we start seeing players/goalies injured too often then I will lower the injury level but I want to avoid having goalies able to play 82 games.