All-in-all, the original injury rules are pretty good at simulating injuries in the NBA. Over the course of an 82 game replay, for instance, you should see about 6 or 7 injuries occur where a player will have to miss multiple games. That seems pretty realistic. Where the injury system falls short, in my opinion, is that it does not account for all the times players get hurt in NBA games. I intentionally use the word "hurt" here, as there is certainly a distinction between getting hurt, and getting injured.
We see guys get hurt in NBA games all the time. A guy takes an elbow to the face while fighting for a rebound, or bangs knees with a defender while driving to the basket. The player might go back to the locker room for stitches in the latter case, or may walk it off on the sideline in the former case, but in both cases the player will return to the game at some point. The player didn't get injured, he got hurt.
To simulate players getting hurt the board game, I've come up with a simple change to the injury system:
Alternate Injury Rule
On a roll of X-12, if an injury is not indicated from the initial roll on the injury chart, a player may still have been hurt during play. Roll a six-sided die and apply the result to the "Possible Injury" section of the injury chart on the game board. The player at the named position was hurt during play and must sit out the remainder of the quarter, before being able to return to the game. If no player is indicated (a roll of 6), assess a technical foul to the offensive team's coach, resulting in a free throw for the opposing team.
It had always bothered me that when the rare X-12 is rolled during play, 75% of the time NOTHING happens; you interrupt play to roll on the injury chart, only to find that, most of the time, nothing actually occurred. Not fun! Using this rule however, now when an X-12 roll comes up in the game, you know that SOMETHING happens, to the detriment of the offensive team. Be it a player actually getting injured, a player getting hurt and only having to miss the remainder of the quarter, or a technical foul being called.
And you don't count the minutes a player is out "hurt" during the game as rest, right? So if a guy needs 18 mins of rest, starts the game and gets "hurt" at the 6 minute mark of the 1st quarter, he sits the remainder of the quarter but still needs 18 more minutes of rest.
ReplyDeleteI see that we are on the same wavelength! I do NOT count the minutes a player is out "hurt" in a game, towards minutes that the player must rest in a game, when using this rule. I don't consider walking off a slight sprain, getting a dislocated finger put back in place, or getting six stiches in the locker room, as being a very "restful" experience.
DeleteI actually did consider adding that as part of the rule, but found that such an addition became wordy, and complex, considering that there are two very different rest/playing time rules presented in the game (Basic and Super-Advanced).
If there were only one rest rule, the Basic game rule, I would have simply added "Do not count minutes missed due to being "hurt" towards the number of minutes a player must rest during a game." But, since some players use the Super-Advanced "Playing Time Chart" in their games, writing an explanation of how that would work, would require an additional three paragraphs of explanation. It makes my head spin.
By the way, I absolutely hate the Super-Advanced "Playing Time/Fatigue Rules." Those rules add a layer of complexity to the game that is totally unnecessary, in my opinion. Now that I think about it, I abhor those rules so much, that I will be writing a future post on why NOT to use Super-Advanced rule 23.0 in your games.