Look, I don’t like it any more than you do: The only story in the entire league right now is COVID. Everything is shut down and will be for almost a full week — at a minimum.

There’s no good answer here, and there’s nothing to analyze. Just accept that everyone in the league is going to test positive at some point in the next little while? Even if you think that’s fine, the bigger issue is that this league is almost wholly dependent on gate revenues, and so they will be begging people to come to games amid a huge surge in COVID cases and, potentially, getting them and/or the people close to them sick. Which, y’know, isn’t ideal.

They just played a 56-game season with very few fans in the building. The appetite to return to that for even a little while has to be non-existent. So it’s real rock-and-a-hard-place hours for the NHL. And, worryingly, we can’t really count on them to make good or right decisions, because this is the NHL we’re talking about.

Let’s go: