Postponed Oilers-Habs contest will NOT be made up today; Wednesday's scheduled game still a go, for now

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Details are slowly emerging as to what happens next after the Edmonton Oilers at Montreal Canadiens game was postponed on Monday night after two members of the home team — Joel Armia and Jesperi Kotkaniemi — were placed on the NHL’s COVID protocol list. The decision to postpone came 15 minutes before warmup and was announced barely half an hour before the scheduled game time of 7pm EDT.

With a three-game series scheduled for Montreal this Mon-Wed-Fri, the initial thought was that the postponement might be immediately made up tonight. But that has now been ruled out, as per TSN hockey insider Pierre LeBrun who tweeted early this morning:

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followed a few hours later by this tweet confirming tonight’s game is a no-go:

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Monday night’s development was the 38th postponement of a game in the NHL this season, but the very first involving the Scotia North (a.k.a. Canadian) Division.

These same two teams had a near miss the last time the Oilers visited La Belle Province, when Jesse Puljujarvi  was placed on COVID protocol after an ambiguous test result came through in the late afternoon, and fellow Finn Mikko Koskinen was replaced on the bench by emergency backup goalie Dylan Wells for precautionary reasons, presumably related to contact tracing. That game was delayed an hour but ultimately played on the scheduled night, with the shorthanded Oilers prevailing, 3-0. Puljujarvi — who may never want to visit Montreal again — was ultimately cleared by follow-up testing and flew back to Edmonton a day or two later, missing just the one game.

This time around it was the home team down a couple of men, coincidentally their own Finnish players. What was different that caused a full postponement? Presumably that testing and contact tracing wasn’t complete among Montreal players, who had earlier participated in a morning skate together.

A make-up game tonight would have been problematic, as it would have forced the Oilers into a 4 games in 5 days scenario, as they are also slated to play in Toronto on Saturday. Current guidelines restrict bunching of games to a maximum 3 in 4 days or 5 in 7, both of which the Oilers did just last week, but not 4 in 5.

Instead, we have a best-case scenario where the Habs are cleared to play tomorrow, and the two teams carry on with a single game to be replayed at a later date. But that is easier said than done.

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The reliable LeBrun offered this scenario last night:

“No word yet on whether the Oilers-Habs game PPD tonight can be played Tuesday, that would depend on further testing/results. But in the event the game is re-scheduled for later in the season, it’s not as simple as just dropping that game somewhere. My sense is that this would be a multiple team domino effect with other games being switched around and ultimately a North Division game being played May 10 at the end of the regular season. Though I doubt this very game would be that day. Probably a game involving less travel.”

The Oilers have three days off at the end of the current road trip, so one possibility has them returning to Montreal next Wednesday, Mar 31. That would necessitate the Habs rescheduling one game from a set with Ottawa Senators on Mar 28-30-Apr 01, but that game could be made up at season’s end with considerably less travel than an Edmonton-to-Montreal flight for a single game.

That’s just one scenario of many which could be made to work, but with so many games packed into a tight schedule in a division with an odd number of teams, it’ll be a headache.

For now, the Oilers and their fans will wait for their opponents to be cleared to play tomorrow. The good news is that the postponement was of the first game of the series, before the two clobs had shared the same ice surface at considerably less than social distancing norms. One postponement is a pain in the neck, and a second or even a third would be considerably moreso.

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That said, postponement due to “an abundance of caution” sure beats the scenario involving a played series between Buffalo Sabres and New Jersey Devils in late January. Those encounters occurred as multiple members of the Devils were being added to the COVID protocol list on a daily basis and may have resulted in team-to-team transmission. Within a week the Devils had 16 players on the COVID protocol list, the Sabres 9 plus then-coach Ralph Krueger, while the two linesmen who worked both games of that ill-fated series also were sidelined.

It left the Sabres reportedly “furious” with how the situation was handled, as summarized in these tweets from The Athletic‘s Buffalo report John Vogl.

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Multiple games were subsequently postponed for each team and both saw their season effectively derailed. The two clubs now languish at the bottom of the East Division standings, hopelessly out of playoff contention.

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