NHL players 'terrified' of possibly testing positive at the Olympics.

Over the course of the last several weeks we have been hearing talk of increased concern from the National Hockey League when it comes to participating in the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. 

It's easy to see why the league and its owners would be concerned about their prized players traveling to a foreign country, where thousands of other athletes will be located from all over the world, when Covid has already proven nearly impossible to manage on home soil. Concern from the owners is to be expected, but now for the first time we are hearing that some players have legitimate concerns of their own.

One NHL player, who was not identified, admitted that a number of players are very concerned about what would happen to them in the event that they tested positive for Covid while at the games themselves. According to this player, that would been a 3 week stay in China, not something any player wants to do in the middle of an NHL season.

"If you test positive in China you’re stuck there for three weeks," said the player as per EPSN's Emily Kaplan. "That’s brutal. Guys are terrified of that."

It sounds like these concerns are serious enough that the players have at least weighed the possibility of potentially pulling out of the Olympics, although to be clear at this time there is still no indication that they will go down this road. In the event that they do however, Kaplan believes that the league could shorten its planned Olympic break from 3 weeks down to just a single week, potentially even filling some of those days with games that have been postponed this season.

This conversation really gained steam when the league was forced to temporarily shut down activities for the Ottawa Senators due to a significant number of players testing positive for Covid, and there's no doubt that today's development will only continue to push it further.

Earlier today the NHL announced that the New York Islanders would be forced to suspend activities over the coming days, also due to an elevated number of positive tests on the team.