TAMPA, Fla. — In the past couple of weeks, the National Hockey League has seen multiple cases of COVID-19 in teams, forcing games to be postponed.
The Bolts announced Sunday that Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, Mikhail Sergachev, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Brian Elliott and assistant coach Rob Zettler have entered COVID protocol, according to a Lightning team reporter.
This announcement follows shortly after Lightning head coach Jon Cooper entered COVID protocol on Dec. 21.
As of now, the Tuesday game of Tampa Bay Lightning vs. Montreal Canadiens doesn't appear to have been postponed or canceled.
The NHL also announced it would withdraw from the Winter Olympics due to the disruption of its regular-season schedule.
With 50 games already postponed, there was a fear the NHL would be unable to complete a full 82-game season while also taking a break of more than two weeks in February for the Olympics. The NHL’s bottom line is at stake with the league and players drawing no direct money from competing at the Winter Games.
While the NHL and NHLPA agreed on Olympic participation last year as part of a collective bargaining agreement extension, the deal to go to Beijing was contingent on pandemic conditions not worsening. A material interruption of the schedule allowed the league to pull out, and the delta and omicron variants spreading across North America not only caused games to be pushed off but made some players hesitant about going to China.
As a result, the men’s hockey tournament at the Olympics will go on without NHL players for the second consecutive time.