Montreal Canadiens: Tonight’s Game Shouldn’t Be Only One Postponed

The Montreal Canadiens were supposed to take on the Boston Bruins tonight at the Bell Centre.

But, with the NHL currently dealing with a significant number of Covid-19 positive tests, this game will be postponed.

The Canadiens won their most recent game, 3-2 in a shootout in front of an empty Bell Centre. Less than two hours before the scheduled puck drop, the team announced that fans would not be permitted to attend the game. This surely set off a logistical nightmare for fans who bought tickets and travelled to Montreal for the contest.

While the timing of the announcement was horrible, and likely could have been avoided, it was the right decision. So was postponing tonight’s game. In fact, the NHL has not done enough to stop the spread of the virus that is seemingly taking over almost every dressing room in the league. It also seems this time, that things are more difficult to get under control as the virus is spreading more rapidly than ever.

For that reason, the league needs to pause and wait until it has everything under control before restarting the schedule.

Yes, this would be a nightmare to try and reschedule and would probably cost millions of dollars of revenue suddenly hanging in the balance. But the health and safety of the players should be more important than what amounts to a small portion of the NHL’s enormous yearly revenue.

Jonathan Drouin was recently quoted as saying he doesn’t feel comfortable playing against teams that have had positive cases. Former Canadiens winger Nick Cousins flat out called out the league for not acting soon enough and said they should shut everything down until after Christmas so teams can get things under control again.

The NHL announced yesterday that the Calgary Flames, Colorado Avalanche and Florida Panthers will all have their games postponed until after Christmas.

That’s just three teams. Meanwhile, 16 teams have had at least one player test positive in the past week. There also doesn’t seem to be a set rule for when a team is going to have games postponed. The Avalanche have had a total of five positives and they will be shutdown. But they played against Nashville recently and the Predators have seven players and their entire coaching staff who have tested positive but they continue to play.

The league doesn’t even know when to tell a team to stop their activities so they clearly aren’t prepared to get things under control. Drouin is right, players shouldn’t have to worry about whether an opponent has Covid or not when they go in the corner.

The league needs to shut things down and make sure things are under control before they start playing games again.