Over the past week five teams in the National Hockey League have been forced to shutdown, and have their games postponed due to COVID-19 outbreaks. The teams included are, Vegas, who are back in action on Friday night, New Jersey, Buffalo, Minnesota, and Colorado. All these teams have one theme in common, they're based in the United States where the COVID-19 pandemic is showing no signs of slowing down.

While going through the entire shortened season without any outbreaks was going to be impossible, having five teams shutdown in a week-to-ten day span is not ideal. Further action will be required in the American divisions to keep COVID-19 cases down.

On Thursday, the NHL announced a series of enhanced safety measures to stop the spread of the virus around the league. The NHL has stated that the glass behind the players benches has been removed to allow for better air flow, and that they will be using HEPA filters to improve air quality.

One additional measure the NHL is implementing is that players and coaches can arrive no earlier than one hour, and forty-five minutes prior to puck drop. That caused some issues among players including Winnipeg Jets forward Mark Scheifele.

North of the border the Canadian division has had zero stoppages, and no cases of COVID-19 to date. While the overall state of the pandemic is improving across Canada, players can't help but think about the situation in the United States.

Montreal Canadiens players association rep Paul Byron discussed the NHL's COVID-19 situation with the media, and mentioned that the league needs to have further restrictions, and teams need to tighten up. Byron also mentions that it's not necessarily the players fault either, due to teams being in hot spots, and risking potential exposure anytime they leave their house.

"Unfortunately, the virus, the spread, how it's being spread, is still unknown to a lot of places. Things are really bad in the US. I think it's just a situation where some of those teams are, the cases are really bad, so every time they leave their house they're unfortunately in a position to be exposed. Like I said earlier, we're pretty fortunate to be in Canada that even though cases seem pretty high, relative to the US they're still pretty low, and the governments done a really good job of keeping us safe and making sure we can't go to these places to be exposed at. So, I'm not sure how we go forward, but I'm sure things are going to start to tighten down and protocols are going to change, and we could be in a situation where maybe we look to the NBA and see how they've had success and maybe adopt some of their rules and protocols." Byron said.

The NHL is approaching the one month mark since they kicked off the 2020-21 season, and they are hoping that going forward they can minimize the amount of players and coaches catching COVID-19.

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