Nov 19: The league has rescheduled Ottawa’s November 16 game against the Devils for December 6. The Senators are preparing for many of their players to exit the protocol tomorrow and reopen facilities. Their schedule will resume on Monday against the Colorado Avalanche.
Nov 15: With nearly half their regular roster in the COVID protocol, the Ottawa Senators will be shut down for the next several games. Bruce Garrioch of Postmedia reports that the team’s next three games–against the New Jersey Devils, Nashville Predators and New York Rangers–will be postponed. The team will stay off the ice until later this week and are currently scheduled to restart their season on Monday against the Colorado Avalanche. The league has confirmed the shutdown, indicating that not only are games postponed through November 20, but the team’s training facilities have been closed until further notice.
Matt Murray, Nikita Zaitsev, Connor Brown, Nick Holden, Austin Watson, Josh Brown, Victor Mete, Dylan Gambrell, Alex Formenton, and assistant coach Jack Capuano are currently in the protocol.
This is pretty close to a worst-case scenario for the league, which obviously hoped to get through this season without any COVID-related postponements. The league already watched as the San Jose Sharks played a half dozen games without seven key players, and the Senators have been struggling to find healthy defensemen in recent days. In fact, the Senators signed Zac Leslie to an NHL contract just yesterday to give them some more organizational depth, something that may not have been necessary now that they’re going to shut things down for a week.
Important to remember here is that the NHL still has the ability to opt-out of the 2022 Olympics if their schedule is adversely affected by COVID postponements in the coming months. That decision must be made by January 10, 2022, and would obviously create an incredibly challenging situation for the representing countries to find and prepare a substitute roster in just a few weeks. Keeping the schedule as is and hoping teams can get through outbreaks without postponement is obviously the goal, but with the Senators things had gotten out of control.
It is unclear when the postponed games will be played.
would it have taken this long if it was the Leafs?
So, @Gavin, does this qualify as “the other shoe drops”?
Meanwhile, they kicked our ***.
DeSmith is back to looking like a mediocre AHL goalie.
Isn’t it a little strange if all of the players are vaxed how can this many come down with COVID? Going to China during the winter is such a bad idea for multiple reasons. NHL should pull out of the Olympics and maybe allow players to go only at their own risk.
@Djapana – I agree! Well put!
Totally agree with @Djapana & @Mac , as stated earlier this summer in post, that the chaos is’nt over and going to China is not worth the risks to all NHL Players, regardless of what country represented. Stay Safe ,
@Mac, Check out info on Olympics , enjoy your Thanksgiving, don’t eat all the turkey
oops!
link to prohockeyrumors.com
@G – Sorry I missed this earler. I have the misfortune of being stuck with a Billy Barty-sized refrigerator. Last year’s turkey is still in the freezer, until I figure out how to make space to thaw it out to cook. But, I have to confess, that I will, in fact, eat it all, except for the toy surprise on the inside.
i think this years winter olympics is a bad plan, weather you believe what they say about covid or not isn’t the question, it’s still a hot issue that the majority of the world are still concerned with. now we’re going to have an international event in the “hot bed” of covid imo i just see this ending badly. i know it would be a huge pain to relocate the olympics at this point but they had about 2 years to come up with an alt site and award china the next winter olympics. imo it just sounds asinine to send athletes to the country where this bs started and almost 2 years later there isn’t a resolution. if i was an nhl owner (and this once i’m going to side with them) i don’t want my multi-million dollar investment going overseas and play in a competition that has no effect on my team other than if he gets covid and for 2 weeks i’m out that guy.
All the staff and players are vaxxxed and now this? WOW! But its all the unvaxxed conspiracy theorists facebook group chats MAGA hatted stupid white grumpy conservatives and faux news fault amirite?
Dont see the self righteous fools crying all out that its all “their” fault why we cant get back to nOrMaL.
Is it also a coincidence that the outbreak happened to the team which resides in one of the most screwed in the head COVID totalitarists states on planet Earth? The Florida teams seem to be doing fine. What a shocker
What was thought to be an 11 to 1 ratio of unvaccinated vs. vaccinated people dying of Covid over the summer (mostly in FL and TX, each of which lost more residents to Covid in the past 18 months than Americans killed in the Vietnam War) was incorrect because it’s hard to get accurate info from so many sources in real time.
Now that they have had time to compile the data, we now know it was actually a 40 to 1 ratio.
40 unvaccinated people dead for each vaccinated person who died of Covid. in the US this summer.
Chuck Darwin asked for volunteers. And they raised their hand. As you raise yours.
Carry on…
Oh nevermid here we go again. Nothing to comment on the matter of the article for @forwhomjoshbelltolled so here he goes with some unrelated statistics on covid deaths (wow what a shock! From TEX and FLA! Who could have predicted that) taken from the first leftist source he found online. The irony is that if he puts his teenage angst behind, his favorite woke preachers aside, puts the galsses on and reads my comments carefully he wont find anything that contradicts his vaccine claims. He’s fighting air but cant see what hits him. What a pity
And if you took the amount of deaths 4 months before this summer it would be an even greater number of unvaxxed deaths compared to vaxxed.
Just like if you take the deaths from four months in the future, it will be less unva xed compared to vaxxed deaths. Crazy how those numbers are affected by nothing less than when who got vaxxed. In less than a year, the deaths will be greater in vaxxed than unvaxxed cuz as time goes on more people get vaxxed. So you pointed out how time works and how if nobody is vaxxed they cant be a part of death statistics for the vaxxed. I bet you think the vaccines have no side effects cuz theyve been researching the effects for years and years. Oh wait, its new so you wont know till the future and you allowed fear to make you choose to be thw experimental rat. Good for you. Hope you feel like you is so much better than others for allowing strangers to so easily manipulate you
Your Darwin shit is trash. After covid being here a year im still alive. I have a feeling that just because covid can kill somone doesnt mean im heading straight to death if i dont get the vax lol. Your neighbor got robbed so you better get a gun cuz that means you have a 100% chance of being robbed.
You typed all that out just to get yourself mad online?
And once again Josh comes along to spread his medical disinformation.
Guess which state is near the bottom of new covid cases? That’s right, Florida. Meanwhile, the heavily vaccinated northeast is seeing a surge. (BTW, the highest deaths per population still reside in northeast states).
The studies and facts are in and it is very clear that the vax is harming peoples natural ability to fight off the virus variants. Natuaral immunity is the only way out of this, along with proper therapeutic treatment.
How do you call out someone out for disinformation and then close out your post with blatant disinformation?
Maybe if you actually researched the subject, you might make a more intelligent comment than the one you just made.
Gbear is Aaron Rodgers…who knew!?
I’ll take that as a compliment!
i’m going to say this anyone that takes medical advice from an online sports forum is just plain dumb. second for the love for anything holy can we please get away from arguments about getting inoculated or not on a sports platform. if feel the need to argue that point then go to redit or another proper forum for inoculation arguments. no one here is going to argue there case about covid to swing me either way, and i don’t come to site to get updated about covid either, i come here (just like mlbtr) to catch up on sport related rumors. sorry about the rant i’ll get of my soap box now.
This is BS the sharks had to play the last 2 weeks with half a roster and no coach. Make them play the games. Make it equal.
Same thing happened to the wings begging of last year. Wings got hit hard, games kept playong. Couple other teams got hit hard, they started rescheduling games
Once again the great great great leadership of Nhl acts slowly. This should have happen a week ago at least. reality Gary and owners don’t want olympics. They have never gotten benefits do the great great great leadership handling of it from day one.If americans were sure gold medal winners then they would go regardless of anything else.
Bring vaccinated doesn’t mean you can’t get it. It means you shouldn’t die from it. Big, big difference. Hope they are all recover quickly.
It’s true. Just dont tell it anybody or they gon call you MAGA freak
One of the issues as well is many athletes took the J&J vaccine because it was one shot and done. The #s indicate it works but 1 shot does really nothing any longer to prevent getting COVID – works to keep you of the hosp. but really needs to be boosted w/ another shot.
Adding on to that, a hockey team is pretty much one large close contact so easy to see how a couple of guys who get it can infect others + close contacts + this problem. Guessing NHL is going to push players to get boosters ASAP to try and get ahead of these issues.
The NHL has worse COVID numbers than my beer league, sheesh.
Clearly China released the virus to ensure no decent hockey players would make it to the Olympics and their team would win. How have none of you seen this coming?