Hello and welcome back to Geek of the Week! In this week's article, I am going to examine how to value currently injured players and where to take them in your drafts. I will highlight one key player who is currently injured and walk through their season long value.

The most important factor to consider before valuing injured players is whether or not you have ample IR/IR+ spots to stash them on. Generally, if your injured player takes up one of only a few IR spots, leaving you without much flexibility if other injuries happen, he won't provide as much value if you had enough IR spots, where you likely would not use them all. In this article, I am going to walk through the player value of injured players, given there would be plenty of IR spots to stash them on.

First, we need to find the best information on the player to make a prediction on how many games they will miss due to their current injury. We then need to find what the replacement value is for each position. This is the value of the best un-rostered players; the top options on the waiver wire. This can be found by multiplying the amount of roster spots for a given position by the amount of fantasy managers there are. If there are flexible positions and bench spots, you should incorporate this too.

In a standard 12-team league with 2C, 2LW, 2RW, 4D, and 4 Bench spots, assuming one bench can be allocated for each forward position (the other likely for a goalie), here are the following replacement levels for each position: (C36, LW36, RW36, D48). The deeper your league, the worse your replacement level player will be.

Next, we look at the stats these replacement level players would provide to our fantasy team and come up with a projection for the number of games our injured player is missing. This doesn't need to come from one player. Streaming these replacement-level players can provide even more value week-to-week to maximize games played and find the ones on hot streaks.

We can then combine the projection of the replacement-level streamers with the projection of our injured player for a full 82-game projection for our fantasy team. I am going to do this for the player below utilizing my own personal projections which have been recently released. They can be great as a second opinion to Dobber's elite fantasy guide and projections, which you can get here.

Brandon Montour

Montour had shoulder surgery this offseason in June, where he was originally expected to be sidelined for 3-6 months. In August, Panthers GM, Bill Zito, recently stated that he expected Montour to be back "in a month or two". I am expecting Montour to be back sometime in November, leading me to put his games played projection at a hopeful 70. According to my projections, where I have Montour owning a spot on Florida's top power-play unit when he's back. Montour would pick up 14 goals, 49 assists, 63 points, 30 power-play points, 221 shots, 71 hits, and 82 blocks in this time.

A replacement-level defenseman in the standard league I mentioned would be ranked around 48^th. Last year, defensemen in the 48-60 range scored at the following average pace: 6 G, 27 A, 5 PPP, 125 SOG, 100 Hits, 100 Blocks. If you wanted to target peripherals, you could up those stats and target someone like Radko Gudas or Luke Schenn. If you wanted to target more points, you could target someone like Sam Girard or Cam Fowler.

Adding this average pace to the 12 games Montour will miss, brings a total 82-game projection to 14 goals, 53 assists, 67 points, 31 PPPs, 239 shots, 86 hits, and 96 blocks. This is good enough to be in the top 10, maybe even the top-7 discussion for fantasy defensemen on the year. In leagues with ample IR spots, Montour should be drafted according to this 82-game projection, rather than just a 70-game projection.

You can apply this method to other currently injured players like Montour's teammate, Aaron Ekblad, who is estimated to miss a bit more time than Montour, Jake Guentzel, who may only miss 5-10 games, and Max Pacioretty, who might miss anywhere from 5-20 games, assuming he avoids reinjury. If you have ample IR spots, these players are more valuable than many assume.

Hope you enjoyed! See you next week.

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