Exiling Canada's teams would not go over well
No surprise NHL is getting pushback
Quite apart from anything else, a pandemic is an unavoidable test of a society's tolerance for risk and desire for reward. And nothing would better illustrate Canada's, shall we say, quirky tolerances and desires that than if its seven NHL teams were forced to play the upcoming season in the United States — an idea NHL sources floated to reporters this past week.
The original idea was to put the Canadian teams in one division and have them play in their home rinks only amongst themselves, safely north of a closed border. Epidemiologically it was perfectly sensible, posing “very minimal risk to the public,” Manitoba chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin told Sportsnet this week.
“We're dealing with a league that has purchased its own testing, has very strict requirements for routine testing,” Roussin told the Winnipeg Sun earlier in the month, when the Jets were granted special permission to begin training camp. “They have very strict requirements for self-isolation and quarantine that we have reviewed,” Roussin noted; even transportation to and from players' homes would be tightly controlled.
Whatever risk COVID-19 might pose to the players and staff themselves, meanwhile, will likely be more acute if they travel to the U.S. Any germaphobic Ottawa Senators players and personnel would have the most reason to be aggrieved: In the first 15 days of December, Ottawa reported an average of just nine new daily cases per 100,000 population. That was far better than any other Canadian NHL city, never mind the best American one, which over that time was the New York metropolitan area (31). Seven NHL cities in the U.S. were over 70, topping out in Los Angeles at 86.
The best proof that the NHL'S original plan would work likely comes from European soccer: clubs are jetting around the continent playing domestic and international matches, and dispatching their players periodically to their national teams, in many cases amidst far worse case numbers even than in the U.S.: Lisbon saw 91 new daily cases per 100,000 in the first two weeks of December, Madrid 124. Some players, coaches and staff members have tested positive, but the protocols have kept it safely in check.
Still, it should come as no surprise that the NHL is getting pushback. That's just how fretful Canadians are. There were many furrowed brows even when the league was seeking homes for its hermetically sealed bubbles, back in the summer. Now we're talking about players living at home, with partners who go to work or kids who go to school. Toronto and Edmonton, which the summer bubbles played in, are reporting 30 to 40 times as many cases today as they were then.
And it's about optics, perhaps even more than science. I write from Ontario, where testing enough people on reasonable timelines has been a constant, losing battle. If a recent pilot project by Toronto Public Health at a public school is any evidence, there are a heck of a lot of asymptomatic carriers out there waiting to be found — and they're generally not eligible for testing. It has been a signal government failure.
So if the Leafs and Senators roll up with their private testing setup, I can tell you it will go down very poorly with a lot of people. Politicians will hear about it. They can say private supply doesn't impact public supply all they like, and they'll be mostly right, but that's precisely the argument for private health care that never gets anywhere in this country. Indeed, the only truly compelling reason the border is closed to NHL players in the first place is symbolic: Whatever the NHL'S plan is, it doesn't hinge on which side the players are on. But it looks like decisive action, so the league is stuck with it.
Unlike so many decisions that have been made since March, this one doesn't really matter to very many people. The people NHL teams need to operate in a world without fans in the arenas will remain employed; the people who make a living off those fans will remain unemployed. We all get to watch regardless.
But all these decisions are worth remembering for the final analysis of how Canada did against COVID-19: how its leaders thought about things; how they prioritized; what they did with their summers, knowing a second wave was likely on the way; why they took certain actions and not others.
Canada's COVID-19 history will eventually boil down to this: the ninth-fewest cases per capita in the OECD, and the ninth-highest case-fatality rate — the vast majority of those fatalities being in long-term care homes. In other words, institutions and the governments who design and maintain them managed to make the absolute worst out of a potentially relatively good situation, and now it's individuals and families being harangued to stay away from their loved ones over the holidays or else be deemed immoral and uncaring. “It's just one Christmas,” say those who have other household members to spend Christmas with. The mental health toll will take many years to properly assess.
Whatever restrictions those governments foist upon the NHL this season, in hopes of mitigating a near-zero risk, should provide no one any comfort. And any praise they receive for it will be entirely unearned.