EDMONTON — In the end, they’re all just another story to tell when we’re done.
Whether you were part of that Calgary Flames game when a New Jersey snowstorm scared off all but 334 fans back in 1987, or if your team had a game rescheduled because the local NHL arena wanted to show the Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman back in ’74, or if you were there back in ‘78 when the roof caved in on the Hartford Civic Centre two days before the Oilers were scheduled to visit.
Or, if you had hustled home from work in Edmonton for Monday’s 5 p.m. MT start in Montreal.
“I’ve been around the league a long time,” said Dave Tippett, who was speaking before the NHL announced that the Canadiens games had been postponed through March 28. “Getting postponed 15 minutes before warmup? That one’s never happened before.”
This has never happened before either: The Oilers will fly home to Edmonton without playing any of their three games against Montreal.
It began with a surprise on Monday when two Canadiens players ended up on the COVID-19 list in the late afternoon.
“Some guys had some equipment on. I was finishing my warmup and was about to get ready,” said Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. “It was a weird situation, but… a situation we’re in this year. So we just kind of rolled with it.”
“I was taping my sticks,” said Darnell Nurse, “and Harry (equipment man Brad Harrison) came in and told us the game wasn’t on. Harry’s a pretty funny guy, so we thought he was joking at first. But we came to find out the game was actually cancelled.”
So, stop us if you haven’t had something cancelled in the past 12 months.
These guys weren’t looking for sympathy, one day after the Finnish-Canadiens duo of Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Joel Armia’s names popped up on the NHL’s COVID-19 protocol list. That Monday’s game was the first in the North Division to get postponed is a small miracle, really. Not something to get all bent out of shape over.
“That’s the world today. You have to flexible, roll with the punches,” Nurse figured. “You can’t let that derail what we have going on in here.”
The real tragedy is that Montreal — of all NHL destinations — is one place where a guy wouldn’t spend much time lamenting an unexpectedly cancelled game.
A cancelled dinner reservation, maybe, but as great a place as the Bell Centre is to watch an NHL game, an off night in Carey Price’s town isn’t normally a bad thing.
“Montreal is a great city,” agreed Nugent-Hopkins. “We would love to be able to go out to dinner, but it’s just not possible this year.”
So, on Monday, the Edmonton Oilers did what hockey people do nowadays: They showered up and walked back to the hotel, where a nice meal and a ping pong table awaited.
Not exactly Crescent Street, eh?
“That’s the world we live in right now — a bubble between hotel and rink,” said Tippett. “It’s not a normal season. There are going to be challenges, and you’re just going to have to deal with them. Last time we were in here we lost (Jesse) Puljujarvi for the day on a false positive. (Mikko) Koskinen couldn’t play, because he had gone for a walk with him… It’s just part of what we’re dealing with this year.”
The good teams have always dealt well with adversity. Injuries get overcome, tough schedules don’t bury a team, and then the old cliché kicks in: Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
This season you can throw in the COVID-19 protocol that shapes every single little thing around an NHL hockey team. We’re not feeling sorry for guys who make six or seven figures playing hockey for a living, but the rest of us — where health authorities allow it — are at least able to take our significant other out to a restaurant for dinner or a drink.
Not these guys. Not this year.
“We want to keep it out of the locker room. That’s a huge, huge important thing this year,” Nugent-Hopkins said. “You just absolutely can not bring it in.”
The good teams? They’ll get past it.
The ones that don’t deal well with it? They’ll fall by the wayside.
“You’ve just got to embrace it,” Nurse said. “With all this uncertainty, all the things going on this season, it’s easy to complain about everything you have to go through. But you just have to embrace it. It’s a different challenge that we’ll all look back on later on in our careers and say, ‘We played a 56-game season in the pandemic.’
“There’s not much for us to complain about. We get to come out here and play the game that we love. To make some sacrifices to be able to do that, it shouldn’t be too much for guys.”
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