Across the continent today, NHL practice camps are opening before the league restart on August 1 in Edmonton and Toronto. And considering the time and the places where we live, it is happening as expected.
The athletic reported this morning that at least three Canadians from Montreal Players have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past few days or the admission process for the entire training camp, known as “Phase 3”. The Penguins have set aside voluntarily nine players since the opening of their camp today due to secondary exposure of an individual to someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. Which means someone on the team has been around someone who tested positive. and then he was around other people with the team.
This comes after both tampa bay and St. Louis they had to completely shut down their facilities during Phase 2 volunteer workouts due to outbreaks of positive testing with those teams.
The NHL’s boundary-draconian boundaries to publicly identify who has tested positive make it difficult to resolve. The NHL has a rule that all information about the virus will be kept private and anonymous unless the player gives permission to release the information. Therefore, we do not know who the three Canadiens players are, whether they had been in Montreal the entire time or whether they had recently flown and been quarantined. The same treatment in Pittsburgh, where we do not know who has been isolated and who has been exposed to the virus and whether or not that person is a player or tested positive.
However, it’s an awkward read in Pittsburgh, as it was just two days ago that Rob Rossi of The athletic wrote this about the penguins returning to camp. Within that article is a piece of information about Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin pressuring their teammates to return to Pittsburgh and play during the pandemic. Crosby himself had been directing the practices.
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And this is the problem in hockey. While there have been a handful of foreclosure options, the pressure to “play no matter what” is going to force more than a few players to put aside some serious reservations and play. It’s hard to imagine how a younger player, or one with less influence than Crosby or Malkin (who is almost every player in the league), will go against the wishes and urges of those Pittsburgh institutions. There is no (yet) connection between Malkin and Crosby’s driving forces and the precautions taken today, and they may not matter if neither of these people test positive. But in the future, a player will give a positive result that they might not have wanted to be there in the first place, but felt they had no other choice. Hockey and peer pressure so dictated.
So far, the NHL has run 4,439 tests and had 30 positive results, along with 13 others that tested positive outside of Phase 2 protocols. That’s less than a 1 percent positivity rate, which is encouraging. But on a different scale, those 43 players who tested positive came from a group of more than 600 players, according to the NHL Statement. That’s a 7 percent rate, which is not encouraging. Choose the lane you want.
Still, those are two teams that have seen a plethora of players who must be eliminated by at least half of this abbreviated training ground before heading out to play on August 1. With 24 teams still in their home cities, it remains an honor system that players only go from home to the team’s practice facilities and vice versa.
Expect more of this in the coming days.
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