The NHL has moved Monday's scheduled matchup between the Edmonton Oilers and Ottawa Senators to Saturday due to Edmonton's COVID-19 outbreak.
The Oilers have 10 players on the NHL’s COVID-19 protocol list, adding forwards Tyler Benson and Warren Foegele after cancelling practice on Sunday.
The others on the protocol list: Connor McDavid (added to the protocol list on Jan. 5), Derek Ryan (Jan. 5), Tyson Barrie (Jan. 5), Kailer Yamamoto (Jan. 7), Evan Bouchard (Jan. 8), Slater Koekkoek (Jan. 8), Brendan Perlini (Jan. 8) and Ilya Konovalov (Jan. 8).
The re-scheduling means the Oilers won’t play until Saturday and won’t play again beyond that until Jan. 20 against the Florida Panthers.
The Senators, who’ve played the second-lowest number of games this season with 29, have played one game since Dec. 19 and aren't scheduled to play again until Thursday against the Calgary Flames.
The NHL has postponed nearly 100 games this season due to COVID-19 concerns.
Also postponed, but not rescheduled, was Monday's game between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the New Jersey Devils. The Devils added Janne Kuokkanen and Damon Severson to COVID protocol on Sunday.
On Monday, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said the Senators were scheduled to play all the games of their upcoming Western Canada road trip despite attendance restrictions because they don’t “have a lot of room left on their schedule for (the NHL) to build in West Coast swings.”
Daly also said at the time that the league had enough room built into its schedule to complete a full 82-game season, but was running out of time to make up games already postponed due to attendance issues north of the border.
On Monday, Daly said the NHL wasn’t expecting many more games north of the border to be postponed due to attendance issues during an interview with Sportsnet 590 The FAN, as the league is running out of time to make up the games already postponed.
“I wouldn’t say we’re at that point definitively yet, but I think that we’re basically there,” Daly told The FAN Drive Time’s Ben Ennis and Stephen Brunt. “I think what we’ve done for the Canadian franchises, to this point, it contemplates postponements out through kind of the middle of January. That’s about as far as we can go. I don’t expect to see a lot of Canadian home dates further moved — I think we’re pretty much there.”
In his latest 32 Thoughts blog, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman said that teams will have to play through the scheduled Olympic Break from Feb. 7 to 22.
“Some teams will have to play through it, with varying degrees of schedule intensity. The hope was to give everyone approximately a week off, but that won’t be possible in several situations -- particularly in Canada,” he wrote.
