What’s Going On With All The Injuries In The NHL?

If you’re a serious fan of the NHL, your favorite team is probably dealing with injuries right now.

If it isn’t, your team is probably injury-adjacent.

Teams spend more than ever to try to keep athletes on the playing field and out of the injury ward. Yet it’s an accepted fact of life that injuries will happen.

In Toronto, the Maple Leafs have been ravaged by injuries to top players, including Auston Matthews, Matthew Knies and Anthony Stolarz. 

In Florida, the back-to-back defending Stanley Cup-champion Panthers are without stars Matthew Tkachuk and Aleksander Barkov. In Winnipeg, the Jets are without star goalie Connor Hellebuyck, and in Ottawa, the Senators were without captain Brady Tkachuk for more than a month. And don’t ask the Carolina Hurricanes about their defense corps.

These are all players fans pay big money to see, and AHL fill-ins just don’t have the same appeal.

While there have been freak injuries, such as Jack Hughes hurting himself at a team dinner, Eetu Luostarinen suffering burns in a barbecue accident and Charlie McAvoy taking a puck to the face, there’s something different about this season as well.

There’s a compressed schedule so the NHL can pause for most of February while the Winter Olympics are on.

But even if you do accept injuries as part and parcel with the way the game is played, Vancouver Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford noted that this season, and the way the schedule is structured and compressed, makes the schedule particularly punishing this year. The Canucks’ injury list includes Thatcher Demko, Teddy Blueger, Filip Chytil, Derek Forbort and, for one game, captain Quinn Hughes.

NHLInjuryViz (@nhlinjuryviz.bsky.social)
NHL injury summary through 20 November

“With a compressed schedule, yeah, we expected (injuries), but we didn’t expect it to this extent,” Rutherford told Sportsnet. “A lot of teams have injuries. Maybe not as many as we do, but you deal with it.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota Wild and Team USA GM Bill Guerin told THN.com’s Michael Traikos there’s legitimate concern over what we’re seeing health-wise for players this season.

“Everybody is concerned about (the injury bug),” Guerin said. “We understand it. It’s a packed schedule this year. That’s how it has to be in an Olympic year.”

Having solid depth is one of the keys for any NHL team to go far in the playoffs. But more than ever, the schedule in the regular season and the post-season feels like a war of attrition. So teams are going to continue to investigate just about any road that could lead to players staying in the lineup consistently.

To be sure, there are still many variables that could contribute to keeping players safe. Some of it is just dumb luck in a line of work where humans are essentially playing a giant’s game of live-action pinball, so you’re never going to make the sport 100 percent injury-proof. 

The NHL isn’t the only league concerned about injuries. In a recent story by The Athletic, the NBA is also concerned about player health. And the once-on-the-vanguard player health approach in the NBA known as “load management” has now become commonplace. Players routinely sit out games, usually on the first or second night of back-to-back games. Is that where the NHL is headed?

The really worrying part about injuries is that they could get worse later this season with Olympic participation, and then even worse next season, when the league expands the regular-season schedule to 84 games. The NHL has tweaked next season’s schedule to accommodate the increase in games, but could it soon be that it’s acceptable that few players, if any, are going to play in every game? 

Eighty-four games are a lot. We’re sure some players would do it, prizing their good health as one of their most reliable assets as players. But many, if not most, players may be likely to miss at least a handful of games every year from now on.

Fortunately or otherwise, spells in the injury ward comes with the territory. But if player health becomes more of an issue than it already is, we could be looking at a drastically different NHL. 

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