Ek’s Note: Carol, our Canucks writer, and in my opinion the single best Canucks reporter in the business, posted this awesome and important piece, so I moved it to my space this morning. I will be back with my own blog later in the day, but this article is really the important news right now.
Last Monday, ESPN presented a two-hour "Return To Sports" special, with leaders of multiple leagues explaining how they were going to get back into action — and Major League Baseball's Rob Manfred admitting that negotiations to get their players back on the field had been a "disaster."
By Friday, Manfred and his crew seemed no closer to reaching an agreement with players, but that wasn't the only bad news. Spring training facilities in Florida and Arizona were being closed down due to a raft of positive Covid-19 tests — and hockey was also being affected.
Bob McKenzie of TSN reported on Friday morning that the Tampa Bay Lightning had closed their training facilities after three players and two staffers tested positive.
By day's end, the NHL had issued a statement saying that a total of 11 players around the league had tested positive since the beginning of Phase 2 on June 8, out of more than 200 players.
As players return to their teams and are subjected to regular testing, I feel disappointed but not especially surprised to see these positive test results. McKenzie points out two important details further down in his Twitter thread on Friday.
• one positive test doesn't necessarily mean a person is infected; false positives and false negatives do happen, which is part of the reason why regular testing is so important
• while Phase 2 includes very detailed protocols about what happens when players are at the rink, it doesn't really address the other 23 hours of a player's day; with Covid cases spiking dramatically in both Florida and Arizona, it stands to reason that a player could get infected from interacting with a member of the general public — or a family member who has done that
But nobody's throwing in the towel just yet. The league and the players' association have been working hard to try to hammer out the details for how Phase 3 and Phase 4 will operate, and Larry Brooks has some new details on timing:
Canada's federal government has now
officially signed off on the 'cohort quarantine' proposal, which would allow players to 'quarantine together' while remaining segregated from the general public when they come into Canada.
And just in time. Now the winds might even be blowing toward *two* Canadian hub cities. As
Luke Fox wrote this weekend at Sportsnet, "This is a numbers game, and the stats simply favour Edmonton or Vancouver when it comes to spread."
If you want to go deep on the medical side of things, an epidemiologist with a particular focus in the sports world guested on the "31 Thoughts" podcast this week.
Dr. Zachary Binney's interview is well worth a listen. He went deep into how a bubble would work, breaking things down in a detailed but understandable way. Many of his key points echoed what we've been hearing from Dr. Bonnie Henry over these past few months, and while he was generally pretty complimentary towards the NHL's plan, he also brought up a couple of issues that I haven't heard discussed elsewhere:
1) In order for the cohort quarantine to work, players basically need to be Covid-free when they arrive in Canada. That would suggest that they'd need to self-isolate for a period of time before they travel — he said at least a week.
2) He suggests that the players' association would not sign off on enforcement of the bubble, such as guards at the door who would prohibit players from leaving. If players decided to try to bend the rules, the whole plan could be jeopardized.
With positive test rates skyrocketing in the Orlando area, Binney tweeted on Friday that he thinks the MLS and NBA's return-to-play plans might end up having to be shelved. It looks like we'll find out in the next week whether or not the NHL is able to press ahead.
Meanwhile, over in Russia, the KHL is undaunted.
Ben Kuzma spoke with Reid Boucher about his decision to sign on with Avangard Omsk — a club that's based in Siberia, but planning on playing out of Moscow next season while its arena is getting renovated.
I think that means the time is also drawing nigh for Nikita Tryamkin to make a decision about what to do next season.
That's all I have for you today. Rather than ending on a dark note, I will share a recommendation for a show that you can binge watch during this rainy weekend — a documentary series called "Hip-Hop Evolution."
I PVRed the first four episodes from Crave awhile back and finally got around to watching them this week — and they're great. The production team includes good Canadian boys Sam Dunn and Scot McFayden of Banger Films, who got their start with the excellent documentary "Metal: A Headbanger's Journey," in the early 2000s, then went on to produce a number of other good rock and metal pieces including "Iron Maiden: Flight 666" and "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage."
Their storytelling skills are on full display in "Hip-Hop Evolution," where Canadian rapper Shad serves as the host.
Season 1 goes back to the true roots of hip-hop in New York City in the early 70s, and breaks down the technical innovations of the genre as well as featuring numerous interviews with the most influential names.
In Episode 4, which I watched last night, the series shifts to L.A. and the birth of the gangsta rap scene — which all seems highly relevant given everything that's going on today with Black Lives Matter.
There are now four seasons in total. Crave only has Season 1, but all four seasons are available on Netflix.
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