BOSTON – The Boston Bruins will return from an in-season, COVID-19 pause when they play the New York Islanders Thursday night at TD Garden after having two games postponed this past week. Boston has a seven-game home stand awaiting their return to action, ranging from March 25 to April 5.
With the lack of practice and access to team facilities and media sessions, Boston General Manager Don Sweeney met with the Boston-area press via video conference call.
“Our apologies that we’ve been a little off the radar for the last couple of days,” said Sweeney. “You can imagine in conjunction with the protocols and medical advice, we have not returned to the facilities … that’s just adhering to all the medical advice and protocols of the National Hockey League.
“But I want to make ourselves available to answer any questions as we continue to gain knowledge and move forward over the next couple of days with the hope of returning to a practice environment at some point in time on Wednesday, but we have some hurdles to cross before we can get there,” he added.
“Subsequent testing here over the next couple of days may determine who’s available to us. We do believe that we’ll have a couple of players that will be unavailable, and then the rest of the test results will determine who is available to participate on Thursday night if we’re able to do so,” said Sweeney.
“Testing protocols will determine if we get back at full capacity, or what capacity we get to either Wednesday or Thursday. Really most of the time, it revolves around testing and the league has done a fabulous job of trying to add secondary layers of point-of-care on game days and such, and even in our case on game days or on other teams’ cases. So that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to continue to follow medical advice and cross our fingers to a large degree that everybody remains negative, and the people that have to continue to test, and hopefully return with a full group.”
The question that remains to be answered and will play-out when the Bruins return to the ice absent of recent practice and NHL game-level conditioning, is whether there will be a setback, mentally and physically.
“Well, I think there’s mental fatigue involved in a lot of these things. You’ve got a lot of people that are making decisions for you and putting forth their best medical advice. Even whether or not you’re playing that game on Thursday night, you’re not in a normal routine of preparing, you’re not at the rink on Friday. You’re waiting until a certain period of time when test results come back before you’re able to go to the rink as a group. It’s challenging on the players, it’s challenging on the coaching staff. For all teams involved, not just for our team.”
Sweeney and veteran players have taken the role to keep constant communication open to the players.
“Yeah, we try to communicate as effectively as possible, shooting out updates. Certainly Bergy [Patrice Bergeron] does a really good job of connecting with the players when we do have updates. We’ve been in a holding pattern, they know that. They know the quarantine that they’re facing and the responsibilities each individual has before we’re going to be able to get up and running again. They’re going to adhere to it.
“And we’re going to get back and hopefully move forward and not have any more setbacks from the standpoint of games being cancelled.”