The COVID-19 roll call continued, almost unabated, all week long, around the NHL.
First, seven Calgary Flames players were put in protocol. Then two from Boston. Six from Carolina. Five from Florida. Six from Nashville. Six more from Calgary, then three more after that. By Thursday, there were 60 league-wide — and counting. Flames’ games were postponed twice. On Friday the NHL postponed all Calgary’s games through Christmas. The list of healthy Flames players was down to four by Friday morning — Matthew Tkachuk, Blake Coleman, Michael Stone and backup goalie Dan Vladar — just enough to play one long shift of three-on-three overtime.
Colorado and Florida also had their pre-Christmas games postponed.
Of the teams that did play Thursday, many did so shorthanded. Colorado’s Cale Makar and Darcy Kuemper became unavailable so close to game time that the option was put to the team — play or postpone — and ultimately, they opted to play (and ended up losing to a Nashville team missing three of its top forwards).
How surreal was that game?
On the Nashville side, the entire NHL coaching staff was unavailable and then suddenly, so was Dan Hinote, who was supposed to step in for John Hynes on an interim basis (against his former team). On the Colorado side, defenceman Jack Johnson received a negative test in the middle of the first period — rushed to put on his gear — and joined the action after about 16 minutes had run off the clock. Goalie Pavel Francouz made his first regular-season start in almost two years and needed a lot more help than he got from the mish-mash line-up playing in front of him.
There was talk of reinstituting the taxi squads that were in place last year, since the COVID-19 numbers kept creeping up and the league reluctantly started postponing more games on Friday, which was seen previously only as a last resort.
And against that backdrop, there was also a daily, ongoing discussion about the NHL’s Olympic participation and the question, why?
Why, in a year of so much uncertainty, is it even on the table anymore? Doesn’t someone need to step in and say, “there’s too much going on in the world right now to consider travelling to China?”
The NHL and the NHL Players’ Association have the power to do that — and that’s a decision that needs to happen, but probably won’t until early January, just because the league and the PA have until then to see how events play over the holiday season.
The thinking: Maybe the world does a quick-about face — COVID-19 cases plateau — and they start to see signs that the worst is over. In that cross-your-fingers, ultra-optimistic scenario, and with the Olympics not set to begin until early February, maybe they can find a way to navigate a twisting, turning path that gets them to the start line of the Beijing Olympics against all odds.
Put me in the camp of the pessimists that believe that just isn’t going to happen.
Someone mentioned to me Thursday that a handful of player agents are asking their clients to take a good, long hard look at what makes participating in the Olympics so appealing to them — and do those reasons still apply to this event at this particular point in time? To me, that makes a lot of sense. Because we are all aware that philosophically, the Olympics collectively do matter to the players — a lot. They were deeply disappointed when they couldn’t go in 2018. Their collective absence turned the men’s Olympic hockey event into a B-level international competition, with limited appeal to most everyone outside of the actual participants and their families. It also meant that when the league and the NHLPA negotiated that CBA extension back in the summer of 2020, one of the major concessions that got the deal done was reinstating Olympic participation for NHL players.