Carolina Hurricanes’ COVID halt won’t be the last bump in the NHL’s ice
Oh, you thought this was going to be easy?
You thought COVID wouldn’t spread quickly among 12 guys crammed shoulder to shoulder on a bench for a couple hours, once it got a foothold?
The experience of the Carolina Hurricanes, whose game at the Nashville Predators on Tuesday was postponed and whose season is unofficially paused less than a week into the season, highlights how the NHL faces challenges no other league or sport does trying to play through this pandemic, foremost among them the impossibility of any kind of social distancing during the game.
The players can eat dinner in their rooms, eat breakfast in shifts and spread out as much as they can away from the ice, but once the puck is dropped, they’re breathing the same air as the guy on either side of them whenever they’re not on the ice. Unavoidably so.
The Hurricanes made it one game into the season before Jordan Staal went onto the NHL’s COVID list. They got two more games in before they had to halt entirely when Warren Foegele, Jordan Martinook, Jaccob Slavin and Teuvo Teravainen joined Staal on the list, which also includes quarantines, suspected positives and potentially false positives.
How long the Hurricanes will be paused, no one knows. The Florida Panthers as of Tuesday afternoon were still planning to come to Raleigh on Wednesday for games Thursday and Friday. The Tampa Bay Lightning is supposed to follow.
The Dallas Stars had an outbreak during training camp and their opener was pushed back eight days. Including Tuesday’s postponed rematch in Nashville — the Hurricanes beat the Predators 4-2 on Monday — the Hurricanes would have to reschedule at least four games if they’re on hiatus for that long. More likely five or more. In this abbreviated season, that’s almost 10% of the schedule.
No, this was never going to be easy, but that shouldn’t be and shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone.
The only way to ensure the NHL season went on as planned was to replicate the bubbles in Toronto and Edmonton used to complete the 2020 season, which was successfully hermetically sealed. That was anything but an ideal situation; everyone felt isolated and marooned in the bubbles, players, coaches, officials and staff alike.
The consequences were obvious: It was so very un-hockey to see teams limp through the kind of elimination games they usually make the hardest for opponents. Especially early on, there were very few desperate last stands. People were ready to go home.
And that doesn’t even get into the finances, which were expensive enough for the expanded playoffs and prohibitively so for the regular season. The only way the NHL was getting back on the ice in 2021 was in home buildings, with travel, with ads on helmets, with all kinds of cracks where the virus could sneak in.
And it has.
There were 14 players with Staal on the league’s COVID list Monday. It does not include any of the Stars, who have yet to play a game after six players and two staff members tested positive during training camp. Twelve of the league’s 31 teams have at least one player out.
Other professional sports have made this work. Baseball did, after rough beginnings, for the most part. The NFL has had its ups and downs — and reached the point of absurdity once or twice — but is close to the finish line. The NBA is pushing forward. The NHL, because of circumstances outside its control, may have a rougher road ahead.
So put a period on the promising start to the Hurricanes’ season. Even with the two points inexcusably dropped in Detroit last week, two road wins in three tries is still a commendable pace. Monday’s win showed promise in particular, the way the Hurricanes found their groove as the game wore on despite a worryingly typical moment of inattention after scoring the first goal.
At some point, they’ll have to try to pick up where they left off. Whenever that is.
This story was originally published January 19, 2021 at 2:16 PM with the headline "Carolina Hurricanes’ COVID halt won’t be the last bump in the NHL’s ice."
