After a weird morning skate where Daniel Sprong and Justin Schultz weren’t on the ice, were in the process of additional COVID testing, and media availability getting canceled, the NHL announced that tonight’s Washington Capitals vs. Philadelphia Flyers game has been postponed.
While no make up date has been announced yet for that game nor Thursday’s scheduled game against the New York Islanders in their new barn, there might be an opening. Rumors have it that the NHL isn’t going to send their players to the Olympics after all.
The original plan was to send them to Beijing. But the recent COVID-19 outbreak and variant will more than likely change that decision. There’s still a gap in the schedule in February which would be a good opportunity to make up all the games that got postponed around the league if they indeed don’t go to the Olympics.
Sprong and Schultz are still waiting for their test results to come back as of this writing. Evgeny Kuznetsov, T.J. Oshie and Nicklas Backstrom are all in COVID protocol. Garnet Hathaway, Nic Dowd, Trevor Van Riemsdyk, Mike Sgarbossa (false positive), and Lars Eller have all been in COVID protocol this season.
Testing will begin at team’s facilities after Christmas and the NHL hopes to resume the season on the 27th but with this new variant sweeping the world, we might have to go through another period of time without hockey. We certainly hope not.
The smart thing to do is not go to the Olympics. As much as I wanted to see either Team USA, Tom Wilson with Canada, or Alex Ovechkin with Russia win the gold medal, health is most important and the COVID rules for the Olympics about a five week quarantine.
Like we said on the last post, stay tuned because there’s a lot happening right now.