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.

Rnk	Missing Player	Team	Status	Ht	Yr	Off	Total
45	Gary Harris	Michigan St.	should return	6′ 4″	So	3.80	5.04
54	Joel Embiid	Kansas	could return	7′ 0	Fr	2.24	4.84
74	Trevor Cooney	Syracuse	should return	6′ 4″	So	3.82	4.41
120	Spencer Dinwiddie (star until hurt)	Colorado	out w/ injury	6′ 6″	Jr	2.99	3.84
377	Kyle Collinsworth	BYU	out w/ injury	6′ 6″	So	1.91	2.13
467	Mitch McGary (star until hurt)	Michigan	out w/ injury	6′ 10″	So	0.73	1.82
613	Chane Behanan (star until dismissed)	Louisville	dismissed	6′ 6″	Jr	0.58	1.42
680	Durand Johnson	Pittsburgh	out w/ injury	6′ 6″	So	1.23	1.30
899	DaJuan Coleman	Syracuse	out w/ injury	6′ 9″	So	0.37	0.91
1062	Aaron Bright	Stanford	out w/ injury	5′ 11″	Sr	0.29	0.70
1266	Stevie Clark	Oklahoma St.	dismissed	5′ 11″	Fr	0.42	0.50
1395	Isaiah Zierden	Creighton	out w/ injury	6′ 2″	Fr	0.81	0.40
1520	Indiana Faithfull	Wofford	left team	6′ 4″	Jr	0.00	0.33
1638	Deverell Biggs	Nebraska	dismissed	6′ 0	Jr	0.00	0.27
1882	Stevie Repichowski	Tulsa	could return	6′ 5″	Fr	0.32	0.16
2319	Robert Hubbs	Tennessee	out w/ injury	6′ 6″	Fr	0.00	0.00
	Patrick Swilling	Tulsa	out w/ injury	6′ 3″	Sr	0.00	0.00