Skating around virus looking like a tall order
The numbers are piling up in a hurry: Nick Watney on the PGA Tour, a wave of major league baseball players in Florida, 23 Clemson Tigers football players, three players and two staff members with the Tampa Bay Lightning, Ezekiel Elliott and three Dallas Cowboys, and now Auston Matthews have all tested positive for COVID-19.
The delicate house of cards that the sports world is hoping can support a return to play this summer is looking shaky before they even open the deck.
This doesn’t mean the bubble concepts being planned by the various leagues won’t work — none of these players had entered a bubble yet — but it sheds light on how easily things can fall apart, especially when you jam a whole bunch of people into a relatively small space.
The NHL has to be very concerned right now. Not so much about the safety and security of their two playoff arcs, but about getting everyone on board in the first place. As we’ve seen already, until they get in the bubble, players are as much at risk as everyone else.
Just getting training camps off the ground is starting to look like a bigger issue than anyone first imagined. With cases spiking all over the United States in the wake of premature reopenings and two weeks of mass protests (33,000 new cases on Saturday alone), it’s hard to fathom 700 people from 24 teams flying across North America and reporting to training camp in less than three weeks without some bringing the virus with them.
The Lightning were skating in pods of six and had to shut it down. What chance do 30-plus people in a training camp stand?
Sure, they can quarantine players who test positive for two weeks. And those they were in close contact with. And then what? Allow them out of their bedroom just in time for Game 1 of the playoffs? What if that player is Connor Mcdavid or Nathan Mackinnon?
Never mind the blueprints, strategies or contingency plans. The success or failure of every league’s return-to-play effort depends entirely on the success or failure of society’s ability to curb the spread of a highly-contagious virus. And in a lot of key battlegrounds, society is losing.
GOING VIRAL
I’m not sure why there is so much hand wringing and weeping over Postmedia’s Steve Simmons writing about Matthews testing positive. The worst thing we can do is stigmatize this, making it sound like Matthews should be ashamed or have something to hide. It’s a pandemic, at some point most of us are going to be exposed to it. If anything, seeing that a high profile hockey player can catch it reinforces the point that nobody is immune, even millionaire hockey players, and people should be more careful.