This chart tracks how many injury episodes a team has had in each regular season, plotted year by year against the league average. Choose a team to see how that franchise compares with the league over time. Choose League Average to see the league-wide trend, where each point is the average number of episodes per team. Choose All Injuries for the full picture, or pick a single injury, such as hamstring or concussion, to see how that one is trending.
It's built for the bigger question behind the weekly report. Are injuries actually getting more common? Is a team's run of bad luck an outlier or a pattern? Is one injury type growing faster than the rest? Years with no episodes appear as zero instead of being skipped, so the lines never skip a season.
How to use it: Set both the Team and Injury filters before you run it. If one is left blank, the lines mix several combinations together.
How it's built:
- An episode is one continuous stretch of an injury on a team's report. A gap of two or more weeks starts a new episode.
- An episode is an injury designation on the report. It doesn't mean the player missed a game.
- Counts cover the regular season only, from 2016 through 2025. The current season is left out until it's complete.
- Non-injury designations (rest, illness, personal matter, and similar) are excluded. Left and right are combined, so Left Ankle and Right Ankle both count as Ankle. Multi-injury entries such as "Ankle, Knee" are their own separate categories.
- The league average is the league-wide total divided by 32 teams.
- The 2021 season added an 18th week, so part of the rise in totals from 2020 to 2021 reflects a longer season.