The National Hockey League will come out of an extended Christmas truce with reserve squads and other roster reviews, in hopes of guarding against further disruption to its season.
Each club will have the opportunity to build a reserve squad of up to six players and to conduct emergency minors recall if absences related to COVID-19 place a team in a position where they cannot play. with full alignment.
The reserve squads, which the NHL brought in during the shortened 2021 season, are expected to be in effect at least until the All-Star break in early February.
Assistant Commissioner Bill Daly confirmed the new rules for team rosters in an email to The Associated Press on Sunday. The Sportsnet network was the first to reveal them.
With these changes, the goal is to allow the NHL to continue its season after the league was forced to postpone 64 games for reasons related to COVID-19.
The 14 games on Monday’s schedule have been postponed to allow for the analysis of COVID-19 tests that will have been carried out on Sunday with players, coaches and staff who have returned to the teams’ facilities.
These returns to facilities have also resulted in a predictable increase in NHL COVID-19 registrations across the league.
The Tampa Bay Lightning added the names of goaltenders Andrei Vasilevskiy and Brian Elliott, defenseman Mikhail Sergachev, forward Pierre-Édouard Bellemare and assistant coach Rob Zettler.
Five players from the Dallas Stars (Miro Heiskanen, Jason Robertson, Joel Kiviranta, Radek Faksa and Michael Raffl), one from the Philadelphia Flyers (Ryan Ellis) and two from the Buffalo Sabers side have been signed on to the protocols. This was also the case for Sabers head coach Don Granato.
The Sabers have indicated that Granato and both players, Dylan Cozens and Mark Jankowski, were asymptomatic.
The Sabers have called off Sunday’s training session, which was set to be the team’s first since December 18.
The NHL entered its Christmas break a day earlier than expected, due to a rapid rise in positive COVID-19 results among players. By the time his hiatus began, more than a quarter of the league’s 32 teams had been put on hiatus due to outbreaks.