COVID-19 cases are on the rise throughout professional sports leagues, which has forced the NHL to enhance its protocols to help better protect the players, including pulling out of the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
The league is shut down until after Christmas with a number of players in protocols. Boston Bruins head coach Bruce Cassidy revealed none of his 10 players who tested positive became "severely ill" and many had no symptoms, while some had mild ones.
The NFL changed its protocols so vaccinated players only will be subjected to spot-testing unless they have symptoms. Unvaccinated players will continue to be tested daily.
Naturally, that's begun to raise questions whether other leagues will adopt that same protocol in hopes to avoid a lengthy pause like we saw in 2020.
Bruins president Cam Neely on Wednesday was asked over Zoom whether he thought the NHL should stop testing players who are fully vaccinated. Here's his full response:
It's tough to say what's going to happen coming out of this Christmas break. Hopefully the positive test numbers start to drop dramatically, and guys are careful over the break, not just on our team but across the league. At some point, we're going to have to start living life and dealing with this as best we can. But we've got to get back on a regular schedule here at some point.
I think that's one of the reasons they were pushing vaccinations was to help obviously with any of your symptoms or help avoiding any kind of hospital visits or stays. I look at all these other businesses across the globe, whether it's office towers or whatnot, I don't think people are testing every day to go to those into those environments.
Sometimes you feel like we're looking for trouble, we're looking for problems when you're asymptomatic. On the other hand, I certainly appreciate the concern for others. But like I said, not every place of business is testing to go into work.
The stress and just the uncertainty of, 'Am I going to be able to play, am I going to get yanked from the bench?' It's been a lot since the bubble in Toronto. Everybody's life has changed dramatically, specifically I can speak to hockey players and the travel party and what we have to go through just to get games played, which I guess is understandable. But it does take its toll on you mentally, there's no question.
You want your family to be careful because you want to be careful because you want to play hockey games, so they have to sacrifice along with you as well. That's where it gets a little challenging, I think, for everybody.
This is the world we're living in. But at some point, we're going to just have to start living our lives. If someone is ill, make sure that they stay away and do take care of themselves.
It's unclear if the NHL will tweak its protocols once games (hopefully) resume next week, but it wouldn't be surprising to see if everything stays status quo while the outbreak subsides.
