I get it. You’re sick of reading about Covid. I’m sick of writing about Covid. I wish I were writing about the recent performances of the Sabres rather than talking about the havoc wreaked by the pandemic as it pertains to Buffalo’s hockey club.
People enjoy sports as a diversion from everyday life. It’s a way to clear one’s mind of the day-to-day stress of a working life and it works as an outlet for pent-up energy. Covid has permeated that barrier between real life and the sports world as it has colored every facet of life over the better part of the last two years. There is no escape from the incessant noise of the virus – at least not in the way that most news can be avoided – because when you stop reading an article, or turn off the radio, or flip the TV off a news channel, everyday life is filled with reminders that we don’t live in a normal world.
There are hand-sanitizing stations, Covid signs, vaccine requirements, mask requirements and a myriad of other signs that tell us we’re not in Kansas anymore.
I’m not here to praise those measures or condemn those measures. They simply exist as an inescapable fact of life in a post-covid world, the same way that 9/11 forever changed airline travel and border crossings. When I was a 9-year-old going to Canada with a friend in 1999 to visit the Hockey Hall of Fame, the only thing my friend needed to cross the border with my family was a hand-written note from his parents saying it was ok for him to travel to Toronto with us. No one in the car showed a passport to enter the country. That would be unthinkable now.
I digress. The Covid-19 pandemic is about to start its third year in a few short months and people are tired. People are worn out, upset, mad, sad and just tired. The NHL makes it very easy to get even more upset at the current situation when looking at the way that it handles the virus.
The Sabres were recently made to play multiple games without Jeff Skinner, Dylan Cozens, Vinnie Hinostroza, Zemgus Girgensons, Mark Jankowski and their head coach Don Granato. Fine. If the idea is that the beat marches on, so be it. At the same time, though, the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs and other Canadian franchises had games rescheduled due to reduced arena capacity restrictions imposed by provincial law makers. So Canadian teams had games rescheduled because they couldn’t make enough ticket revenue, and the Sabres had to play severely short handed while suffering a viral outbreak.
I’m not naà¯ve and I understand how this works. The great poet consortium Wu Tang Clan said it best: cash rules everything around me. Money talks and all the rest walks. Lest you believe I’m being too cynical, consider this: Kyle Okposo tested positive and was removed from practice when his test results came in. No games were postponed subsequently.
In the wake of that development with Okposo, the Sabres have had Casey Fitzgerald, Alex Tuch, Peyton Krebs and Anders Bjork put in Covid protocols. Henri Jokiharu was also held out of practice today for more testing to determine if he should enter the program as well. In the meantime, the Sabres have a game against the San Jose Sharks on Thursday. It looks like that game will be played and the Sabres will once again be forced to play without a large contingent of both their offense and defense.
Thursday’s game figures to be a ridiculous matchup where the Sabres will cobble together something that vaguely resembles an NHL-level defense corps composed of Mark Pysyk, Rasmus Dahlin, Will Butcher, Ethan Prow, Colin Miller and… well, somebody. The forwards will be without the recently dynamic combination of Krebs and Tuch who combined for a highlight-reel goal last game. The entire premise to play this game has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with fulfilling television contracts and the idea of finishing an 82-game schedule.
Meanwhile, our friends north of the border are locking things down fast. It’s understood and accepted the NHL has a multi-national league that the three other major sports don’t have to deal with – or at least they only have to deal with Toronto as the lone representative of Canada in two other cases – and, as a result, the NHL has an incredibly tricky situation on their hands that the NBA and MLB can avoid more easily. That said, the league is not in any way, shape or form prioritizing safety. They’re merely prioritizing the bottom line.
And that leads us back to Covid fatigue. There doesn’t seem to be any logical or science-based approach to how these games are postponed. It’s simply based on dollars and cents (or loonies and toonies as it were). Sabres fans will be presented with a sub-par product Thursday so the NHL can complete its commitments to the rights holders and other games will be postponed for fiscal reasons.
So I get it. You’re tired of Covid as a topic of discussion. I’m tired of writing about it. Unfortunately this topic isn’t going away any time soon.