NHL planning to test players daily for COVID-19

Nick Foligno watches Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s coronavirus briefings and appreciates the value of the information.

It is part of the reason the the Blue Jackets captain supports NHL players undergoing daily testing if the season resumes.

“Testing is a must because it’s the only way you’re going to know and feel confident every time you step on the ice that everyone is in the same boat as you and you can play the game to the best of your ability,” Foligno said.

The first major North American professional sports league to announce a format for its potential return to competition also has a comprehensive COVID-19 testing strategy. There are screening protocols in place for voluntary workouts and training camp in the hands of individual teams. Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly also said the NHL plans to test all players every day when games start happening.

“We will have a rigorous daily testing protocol where players are tested every evening and those results are obtained before they would leave their hotel rooms the next morning, so we’ll know if we have a positive test and whether the player has to self-quarantine himself as a result of that positive test,” Daly said. “It’s expensive, but we think it’s really a foundational element of what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Each test costs approximately $125, the league says, and Commissioner Gary Bettman estimated 25,000-35,000 will be needed to get through the playoffs — a price tag, he concedes, of “millions of dollars.” But athletes have plenty of concerns about risking their health to get back to work, and regular testing is something players insisted on.

“You need testing at a level sufficient to be confident that you’re going to be on top of anything which might happen,” NHL Players’ Association executive director Don Fehr said.

“If that turns out to be daily, and that’s available, that’s OK. That would be good. If it turns out that that’s not quite what we need and we can get by with a little less, that’s OK.”

League and team officials have stressed they would only use thousands of tests if that number does not endanger the supply for the general public. Bettman said medical experts told the NHL that by the time games could resume this summer, 25,000-30,000 would be “a relatively insignificant number.”

Protocols for voluntary workouts and training camps require PCR testing where available, and Daly said the NHL continues to study the potential use of antigen testing.

The Spanish league is resuming in less than two weeks with Real Madrid playing its games at the club’s training center. Madrid will host Eibar on June 14 at the 6,000-capacity Alfredo Di Stefano Stadium, a venue used mostly by the club’s “B” team at the Ciudad Real Madrid center on the city’s outskirts. Madrid is not stopping renovation work at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium as all remaining league games are likely to be played without fans because of the coronavirus pandemic. The league confirmed the dates and times of the first two rounds of matches to be played after the competition was stopped mid-March because of the pandemic. The first game will be the Seville derby between Sevilla and Real Betis on June 11. Defending champ Barcelona, which has a two-point lead over Real Madrid after 27 rounds, will resume at Mallorca on June 13, while Atletico Madrid visits Athletic Bilbao the following day . ... Four young players in Germany’s Bundesliga addressed the death of George Floyd in the U.S. with protests against police brutality and calls for justice over the weekend. England’s 20-year-old winger Jadon Sancho, 21-year-old Morocco rightback Achraf Hakimi and 22-year-old Marcus Thuram made statements on the field Sunday, following the example set by Schalke’s American midfielder Weston McKennie, 21, the day before. Sancho scored his first hat trick in Borussia Dortmund’s 6-1 win at Paderborn with no fans present, but removed his jersey after his first goal to reveal a T-shirt with the handwritten message “Justice for George Floyd” on the front.

Tennis: Charter flights to ferry U.S. Open tennis players and limited entourages from Europe, South America and the Middle East to New York. Negative COVID-19 tests before traveling. Centralized housing. Daily temperature checks. No spectators. Fewer on-court officials. No locker-room access on practice days. All are among the scenarios being considered for the 2020 U.S. Open — if it is held at all amid the coronavirus pandemic — The AP reported. “All of this is still fluid,” Stacey Allaster, the U.S. Tennis Association’s chief executive for professional tennis, said in a telephone interview Saturday. “We have made no decisions at all.” With that caveat, Allaster added that if the USTA board does decide to go forward with the Open, she expects it to be held at its usual site and in its usual spot on the calendar. The main draw is scheduled to start Aug. 31. The French Open was postponed from May to September; Wimbledon was canceled for the first time since 1945. There is no established COVID-19 protocol for tennis, a global sport with several governing bodies.