WEST Coast has suffered season-ending injuries to more key players, encouraging coach John Worsfold to deem the club's current injury crisis as the worst he's ever seen.

Brent Staker (thumb) and Josh Kennedy (knee and shoulder) join Daniel Kerr (knee) as the most recent additions to a constantly expanding injury list that includes premiership players Adam Hunter, Brett Jones and Beau Waters, among others.

But with nine of the 10 wounded Eagles suffering impact rather than soft-tissue injuries, Worsfold said he had never seen a more dire state of medical affairs at the club he has spent 19 of the past 22 seasons with.

"It's been as bad as I've ever seen it in terms of contact injuries," he said on Wednesday.

"I think including Brent's ... we've had six or seven fractures or stress fractures, which is pretty high.

"[With] those unavoidable, or seemingly unavoidable injuries, it's the worst I've ever seen it."

Worsfold said the club had no option but to send Staker to surgery, given the serious implications of playing through the hand injury, while Kennedy was only a slim chance to return for round 22 if he persevered with the shoulder injury he has carried since round seven.

The coach conceded he was disappointed serious injuries had cut the promising forward down in his first year at the club, but was impressed with Kennedy since he crossed from Carlton at the end of last year.

"He's had a couple of serious injuries so it's really disappointing, but overall he's fitted in really well and shown what we expected," Worsfold said.

"And we believe that he's got a very strong future.

"The deal was to rest him for a couple more weeks and hope it gets better, but there's no value in that. In two weeks' time, for him to try and up his training load, and come back there's no games left.

"Like most of those shoulders, guys will get them strapped up and battle through the rest of the season and then get them fixed at the end of the season. That was the aim with Josh, but his knee's no good. He can get them both fixed now."

West Coast should have 30 players to pick from for Sunday's clash with Essendon, and Worsfold remains committed to managing his young list despite the injury setbacks.

"It's fairly thin, but overall we possibly could go with only one change with Staker out, so that's a bonus," he said.

"It's fair to say our 25 might have players that we don't think are in good enough form ... and not good enough form in terms of their last week, but overall they're going okay.

"We've tried to lighten the load on (Will) Schofield, (Ryan) Davis and (Tim) Houlihan in recent weeks. We're juggling that a little bit.

"We don’t want to burn out these kids who have, certainly in (Brad) Ebert and Scott Selwood's cases, a history of sore groins.

"We've got to make sure we avoid that. If we rest them at some stage then that opens the door for other young players."