Bracketology: Top Injuries to Watch

You can pull up the values of 668 players on the 68 tournament teams, but you need to know the 17 who are injured or have left the team before you make your bracket selections. The team most hurt is BYU, which just lost Kyle Collinsworth (in the top 10% of all players), while the tournament hopes of Michigan State, Kansas and Syracuse could respectively rest on if the top three injured players – Gary Harris, Joel Embiid and Trevor Cooney, – return.

Those three are all top-100 players (of 3500 players in the database). Spencer Dinwiddie (Colorado), Mitch McGary (Michigan) and Chane Behanan (Louisville) would have been top-100 players as well, and were lost earlier in the year. Harris’ 5.04 rating means that based on a calculation of everything he does on the court, Michigan State would be five points worse with him out – so a 73-70 win would have likely been a 69-71 loss without him, and vice versa. Here is the list of all 17 players who played enough to get in the database, but are injured or at least questionable.

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