GARRIOCH: Ottawa Senators on track for players to come back from COVID-19

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Ottawa Senators are getting used to changing on the fly.

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They have done it so much this season that it has become an old habit.

While they were scheduled to board their Air Canada Jetz charter flight on Tuesday to head to Seattle to prepare to face the Kraken expansion Thursday at the Climate Pledge Arena, that game was the club’s eleventh postponed this season due to the COVID outbreak. 19 in the Senators’ camp. .

Of those 11, only one has recovered and senators are waiting for the NHL to reschedule the rest. With the decision not to send players to the Winter Olympics in February, the Senators will have a busy month because they have 10 games to make up and eight of them are at home.

Instead of hitting the track Tuesday, the Senators opted to keep their distance with nine players and assistant coach Bob Jones on COVID-19 protocol. That’s the best bet with the Omicron variant spreading like wildfire, but the good news is that the club should have everyone on deck by Friday.

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Goalkeeper Anton Forsberg will be out of protocol when the Senators hit the ice Wednesday at the Canadian Tire Center and so will winger Tyler Ennis. Center Josh Norris, along with Nick Paul, Dillon Heatherington and Jacob Bernard-Docker, will be out Thursday.

By the time senators leave for Vancouver on Friday to prepare to face the Canucks on Saturday at Rogers Arena, Thomas Chabot, Zach Sanford and Chris Tierney should be given the green light, along with Jones, with the quarantine now reduced to five days in Ontario. . .

The NHL’s decision to postpone the Seattle game at least gives the Senators a chance to be close to their full roster. The club is coming off a 6-0 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday at Scotiabank Arena and put five players on protocol before the puck landed there.

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That game probably should never have been played in the first place, but the league is doing its best to try not to extend the season and play a full 82-game schedule.

“The games where our level of competition was not great all surrounded COVID-19 outside of Vancouver’s game (a 6-2 loss on December 1),” coach DJ Smith told reporters Monday. “In my opinion, they surround guys who are sick and who just don’t have legs.

“Our team always plays hard and I don’t think anyone can take that away from us more than a few punctuals. In Toronto, a lot of guys just didn’t have it, but questioning our competition just isn’t fair. “

Anyone with any credibility wouldn’t question the level of competition against the Leafs and all they had to do was look at the list of players who went into protocol for the day to realize it was going to be a rough night.

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It should be easy for anyone who watches this team on a regular basis to see that the club has no energy against the Leafs. Goalie Matt Murray wasn’t at his best, but without him making 34 saves, it could have been a lot worse because the Senators weren’t generating opportunities.

Telling senators to play the Kraken on Thursday would have been the wrong message for the NHL. The roster would have looked like a preseason game in late September, not a midseason effort in January, when players are supposed to be in tip-top shape.

The Leafs were closed for nearly three weeks and never played a game without a player on protocol. They came back against the Senators, but the NHL needed 10 players in November to postpone three Ottawa games.

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“There are a lot of key guys on our team that are out at the moment, which is an adversity that we thought we finished with the first wave earlier in the year. We thought we had it fixed, ”said Captain Brady Tkachuk.

So did everyone else around the senators.

While the NHL is not thrilled with playing on capacity limits in Canada, there is simply nowhere else on the schedule for the league to move this trip out west, so it will continue with stops in Vancouver, Edmonton (Monday), Calgary (Thursday) and Winnipeg (Saturday).

At this point, the Senators are scheduled to face the Buffalo Sabers at home on January 18, and we’re at a point where the league doesn’t feel like it can move more games so they can be played on an empty court. the return to Stage 2 for Ontario on Monday.

NO FANS IN BELLEVILLE

The club’s AHL affiliate confirmed Tuesday that games against the Springfield Falcons on Friday and Saturday will go ahead as planned, but with no fans at the CAA Arena.

Although the province was originally going to allow 1,000 people in attendance when more capacity limits were announced last week, that number was eliminated entirely on Monday.

This will be the first time that Belleville has been outfitted with the runway empty. Last season, the club played outside the Canadian Tire Center.

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Twitter: @sungarrioch