Injuries & Discipline

A few risks follow your roster all season: getting hurt, taking a penalty serious enough to cost you the player for the rest of that game, and — away from the ice entirely — losing a player to the books.

Injuries

Injuries happen during games at a modest rate — expect a handful across a full season for a typical roster. A player's own durability lowers his own risk, while a heavily physical opponent raises it. Not every injury is equal:

• A mild injury doesn't even pull the player from the game he's in.
• A moderate or severe injury ends his game immediately and sidelines him afterward — anywhere from a short absence to several weeks, depending on severity.

Recovery time isn't fixed, either — a strong Medicine Center and Recovery Suite both shorten how long an injury keeps a player out. See Facilities & Arena.

Medical Hardship Waiver. A player who suffers a severe injury early enough in the season — before he's played much of the schedule — is entitled to a waiver that restores the year of eligibility that season would otherwise have cost him. See Eligibility & Roster Rules.

Every injury a player suffers, across every season, is logged permanently to his career history — visible on his profile alongside his transfers, draft moment, and other career milestones.

Discipline

Fights and game misconducts are rare, deliberately so, but they scale with how physical a player is. A heavily physical roster carries real discipline risk alongside its edge on the ice:

• A major penalty (a fight or a serious misconduct call) puts the offending team on a long penalty kill that runs its full length regardless of what happens on the power play — unlike an ordinary minor, it doesn't end early just because the power play team scores once.
• A game misconduct can eject a player from the game outright. When that happens, the best available bench player of the same position steps in immediately rather than leaving that unit permanently short-handed — the same substitution logic that covers an in-game injury.

Academic Eligibility

Once a season, midway through, every roster faces an academic eligibility check. It isn't a fixed lottery — the risk tracks a player's happiness directly: a content player is very unlikely to run into trouble, and risk climbs the more miserable a player becomes, accelerating fastest once happiness is already in a bad place. See Team Chemistry & Player Happiness.

A player who fails is suspended for the rest of that season, postseason included, not just a game or two — though the check can never wipe out an unreasonable chunk of your roster in one sitting; if an audit comes back unusually bad, it's the unhappiest players among those flagged who actually sit, not the whole group. A suspended player returns fresh the following season. A strong Academic Support investment meaningfully lowers the risk across your whole roster. See Facilities & Arena.

See Also

• Facilities & Arena — Medicine Center, Recovery Suite, and Academic Support's effect on these risks
• Lineups & Special Teams — how the lineup responds to an injury or ejection mid-game
• Eligibility & Roster Rules — the Medical Hardship Waiver
• Team Chemistry & Player Happiness — what drives academic risk