Name: Drance: J.T. Miller is right. The Canucks' post-outbreak schedule is cruel, unfair
Brand: theathletic.com
SKU: theathletic-com-288
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Drance: J.T. Miller is right. The Canucks' post-outbreak schedule is cruel, unfair

preview

Apr 14, 2021The will hit the ice for practice Thursday morning and again for a pregame skate Friday.Friday night, they’ll host the . And the very next day — with less than a 24-hour turnaround to accommodate the broadcast schedule — they’ll play the . They’ll then proceed to play five games in seven days.Talk about a rude “welcome back” from the . Not to mention the baffling acquiescence of the NHLPA.What remains of this ill-fated Canucks season will be played, and played in full. It just won’t be pretty, it won’t prioritize the gradual, humane recovery of the players and staff involved, and it probably won’t be remotely entertaining from a fan’s perspective.Nonetheless, the show will go on. The Canucks will return and face six sets of back-to-back games down the stretch, opening with a five in seven and nine in 14. On the heels of a COVID-19 outbreak that ran through a majority of the club’s players and coaching staff, infecting 25 members of the organization in total — some of whom got very ill, some of whom continue to feel ill effects and many of whom passed the illness along to their family members — the club will be tasked with playing 19 games in 31 days with only the narrowest hope of qualifying for the Stanley Cup playoffs.Of course, that narrow hope is beside the point.“I hope people don’t take this the wrong way, I’m a super competitive guy …” Canucks forward told the media during a remarkably candid Zoom availability Wednesday afternoon. “But this isn’t about hockey for our team. This is about the health and safety of our players, their family and their children. This isn’t about making the playoffs.”Unfortunately, it isn’t about the health and safety of the players either, at least not in reality.It’s business realities that call for the club to play 56 games and so that’s what they’ll do. Including Miller, who made it clear despite criticizing the NHL’s plans at length that this is his job and that he has no plans to opt out and is working to make himself available to play Friday.He’ll be making himself available in service to his club, the league and the other Canadian teams to permit them to hold steadfast to satisfying their existing broadcast agreements. In a zero gate revenue world, broadcast revenue is everything.There’s something that’s grim and fitting about all this. Sacrificing human considerations to economic growth has been a hallmark of how too many businesses and governments have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, after all.Why the and the Canucks — two teams going nowhere this season — couldn’t have got together and agreed to not play their four remaining games and instead put together a comparable exhibition slate ahead of the 2021-22 campaign with games in Hull and Belleville and Victoria and Kelowna as a make-good to their rights holders and for the sake of basic human compassion, well, I’ll never understand it.I’ll also never understand why, to accommodate Vancouver’s rejigged schedule, the NHL is willing to postpone the beginning of the playoffs in the North Division, but not in the other three divisions — something the NHL release Saturday announcing the Canucks schedule was explicit about.We’re going to get to a mid-May weekend where the Canucks are playing the in a zero-stakes game on a Saturday night, presumably pre-empting scintillating playoff matchups for hockey fans in western Canada.“It’s Hockey Night in Canada! First up, we’ve got playing in Game 3 of his first-round series against his former team, the ! In the late game, and the look to even up their series against and the exciting !“Most of Canada will see that game, but for viewers in Alberta and British Columbia, you’ll watch the Flames and Canucks play out the string at half pace and with no hitting!”Even that will come at a cost, of course, one to be borne by the Canadian contenders.The bill will come due when the Maple Leafs and the Oilers play a sloppy elimination game in the second game of a back-to-back set in Round 2 — before going on to face a much more rested American opponent that’s dealt with a less compressed playoff schedule.In practical terms, the Canucks opened their facility for off-ice workouts Monday and held limited individual on-ice sessions over the past two days. Canucks players have been going through the final clearance stages of their COVID-19 protocol, and going through it at such a rate that several players who remain on the list are scheduled to undergo their fitness testing and cardiac screening at Rogers Arena on Wednesday evening.The club’s scheduled full practice Thursday will mark the first time the club has practised together since a morning skate March 31, a morning skate that was also, unfortunately, a superspreader event.Even for those players who were asymptomatic or never tested positive for COVID-19, this turnaround is a stretch. Asymptomatic players in the protocol are unable to work out per the NHL’s rules; they’re truly advised not to do anything.There’s just no way for an NHL player to have their timing or legs or hands in sync. There’s no way for us to properly describe how cruel it would be to take a player that’s gone through that level of inactivity over the past two weeks and ask them to backcheck against , as the Canucks will be tasked with doing Friday night.That’s to say nothing of a player — and there are at least a small handful of unlucky people among Canucks players and personnel who have dealt with significantly more severe and lingering symptoms as a result of the presumptive P.1. variant that ran through the team, with Miller even describing a teammate “struggling to breathe going up and down steps,” and how they will fare with the cruel and unusual schedule that’s ahead of them.The NHL protocols will limit the club from returning their full gamut of NHL roster players in time for their first game, much less their first practice. A variety of younger players will fill out the roster, using COVID-19 exemption slots to replace those players who remain unavailable because of their continued presence on the COVID-19 protocol list or their persistence of symptoms that prevent them from safely competing. To this point, there’s been no indication that any Canucks players are considering opting out.Symptoms appear to be abating among the majority of Canucks players that tested positive over the past 10 days, but that isn’t a universal fact and it will take time for the club to resemble the one that last played a game March 23. Players who spoke with The Athletic in recent days suggested there was a sense of unease and nervousness about this facet in particular, about the club’s overall readiness to cope with the rigours of NHL competition.“I’m going to set a record for the shortest shift length,” was a grim piece of gallows humour from one Canucks player.“This is nothing to do with hockey,” Miller added. “To be brutally honest, we’re going to need more time than this to come back and play hockey. Even the guys that didn’t get it aren’t ready.”And again, as Miller emphasized numerous times during his comments Wednesday, it’s also because of what the COVID-19 virus does to athletic performance, and the challenges recovery poses even for elite athletes — who still uses an inhaler prior to games after testing positive for COVID-19 in January.So even expecting the Canucks to manage a baseline of competitiveness is a big ask.Which only underscores how completely unnecessary this all is.“It’s frustrating,” Miller said. “We try to talk about our No. 1 priority is our players’ health and their families’ safety and it’s impossible to achieve that with what we’re being asked to do.”It isn’t just risky for the Canucks, either. Over the next 10 days, Rogers Arena will host five of the seven North Division teams, who will play games against Canucks players that are surely still producing positive tests — even if they’re unlikely to still be infectious.There can be no pretense that having the Canucks conclude their 56-game slate is being done in service to the integrity of the schedule, not when the circumstances facing all Canadian contenders already fly in the very face of basic competitive integrity, with no solution in sight considering how vaccination politics work in this country at the moment.Unvaccinated Canadian NHL teams will beat up on an overmatched Canucks club that personifies the inordinate risk of unmasked, on-ice athletic competition while an ugly third wave of COVID-19 is swamping the Canadian health care system in places like Toronto and Vancouver.Meanwhile, mostly vaccinated American clubs will begin competing in the playoffs even as the Canucks’ brutal schedule is still ongoing.No, the welfare of Canucks players and staffers, their families, the competitive integrity of competing for the Stanley Cup on relatively equal footing, the quality of the NHL product from the perspective of Vancouver hockey fans, that’s all out the window.“It’s kind of crazy,” Miller said. “I know everyone has a job to do, but to expect our entire team to be ready to play in one practice and a pregame skate is a bit hard to comprehend.”Indeed it is. So make sure to tune in anyway. You wouldn’t want to miss watching a group of athletes recovering from a respiratory illness in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic play out the string in order to fulfill broadcast commitments.(Photo: David Kirouac / Icon Sportswire)

Apr 14, 2021The will hit the ice for practice Thursday morning and again for a pregame skate Friday.Friday night, they’ll host the . And the very next day — with less than a 24-hour turnaround to accommodate the broadcast schedule — they’ll play the . They’ll then proceed to play five games in seven days.Talk about a rude “welcome back” from the . Not to mention the baffling acquiescence of the NHLPA.What remains of this ill-fated Canucks season will be played, and played in full. It just won’t be pretty, it won’t prioritize the gradual, humane recovery of the players and staff involved,...

public

Thomas Drance

Get every sports story that matters. Download The Athletic app: https://linktr.ee/TheAthletic

Drance: J.T. Miller is right. The Canucks' post-outbreak schedule is cruel, unfair

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS