The drive to allow National Hockey League players to participate in the Olympics for the first time in eight years collapsed on Tuesday, people familiar with the matter said, as the league and its players’ union struck a deal to drop out of Beijing 2022 amid a hugely disruptive Covid-19 outbreak.
An official announcement is expected to come on Wednesday after the league has a chance to speak with players, these people said. The NHL did not consult or seek permission from the International Olympic Committee or International Ice Hockey Federation in making its decision.
The move will also set off a scramble to fill Olympic hockey rosters around the world on short notice.
The decision came hours after the league and the NHL Players’ Association agreed to pause the current season until Dec. 26 as the league struggles with Covid-related problems that had already brought it to a near standstill.
The NHL faced a mounting scheduling headache as Covid spread rapidly through the league this month, leading to the postponement of 50 games as of Tuesday afternoon. The league’s Olympic decision is also influenced by the difficulty of dealing with stringent health protocols that will be in play in China—and could strand players there for weeks if they test positive at the Games.
By keeping players at home, the league can use the three-week hiatus it built into the schedule for the Olympics to instead reschedule dozens of games that have been postponed by Covid clusters.
The NHL’s flurry of adjustments illustrates dilemmas facing many other organizations and individuals: How to respond to a more transmissible variant when the workforce, which is mostly vaccinated, is testing positive in numbers not seen since the early days of the pandemic in 2020?
Since the time the new variant was discovered in South Africa in early November, 12 NHL teams suffered serious enough outbreaks that the league has called off their games and shut down their home rinks and training facilities for extended periods. By Monday afternoon, 19 of the league’s 32 teams were due to be inactive through Dec. 27 with 43 games postponed. The NHL called off the remaining five games after Dec. 23 late Monday, effectively putting the entire league on pause until next week.
Coronavirus issues on the Washington Capitals forced the league to postpone the team’s game against Philadelphia less than eight hours before puck drop.
More than 131 players—18% of active skaters—and five coaches are currently in the league’s Covid-19 protocols as of Tuesday afternoon. The NHL has not specified whether the individuals who tested positive had been fully vaccinated or received booster shots, but did note in a statement on Sunday that “there have been a low number of positive cases that have resulted in concerning symptoms or serious illness.”
The mild nature of these wide-spread outbreaks is the NHL’s primary rationale for saying no to a league-wide pause over the weekend despite the fact that nine—nearly one-third of all clubs—are currently barred from using team facilities.
Instead, the NHL tightened health protocols, such as masking and social distancing, and resumed daily testing, something it exempted vaccinated players and staff from this season. The league postponed 12 games through Dec. 23 that require crossing the U.S.-Canadian border due to uncertainty surrounding travel.
The league said on Sunday that its medical professionals would make decisions on whether teams should suspend organized activities on a “case-by-case” basis. Within hours, the NHL shut down Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs facilities. On Monday, the Columbus Blue Jackets and Montreal Canadiens were added to that list. All clubs will be closed through at least Dec. 26 and were not given firm dates for when their rinks could reopen.
Altogether, the NHL season was “materially impacted” and transpacific travel had become “impractical or unsafe,” more than satisfying the conditions necessary to back out of allowing skaters to compete in the Olympics, something it had agreed to as part of the collective bargaining agreement it signed with the NHL Players’ Association in July 2020—which paved the way for the 2019-20 season to resume in two Canadian bubbles.
According to that agreement, the NHL had until Jan. 10 to make a decision about the Olympics without facing a financial penalty from the International Ice Hockey Federation.
Rescheduling games aside, players and league executives shared concerns about the health protocols the Beijing 2022 Organizing Committee has laid out for Games participants. Anyone who tests positive is required to serve a 21-day quarantine in a Chinese facility, which could have potentially kept skaters away from their domestic NHL teams through March. Additionally, strict contact-tracing measures require anyone exposed to a person with a confirmed case to enter isolation, with limited options for testing out, or leave the country immediately if they have received a negative result within 24 hours and are asymptomatic.
“I don’t understand why anyone would agree to take the risks of being in the position that we will be in once we board that plane and go to China,” said San Jose Sharks defenseman Erik Karlsson, a 2014 silver medalist with Sweden.
Skaters in the running to represent the U.S. in Beijing recently expressed fears to USA Hockey that the Omicron variant might make China’s health protocols tighter still, said U.S. men’s national team general manager Bill Guerin last week. At the time, he still planned on being able to fill his roster with professionals and had not given much thought to “Plan B:” a Team USA made up of amateur college kids and minor league players.
It sets up an Olympic hockey tournament with considerably less star power for NBC, which owns the broadcast rights to the Games.
“We understand the decision, but the Olympics remain the greatest hockey tournament in the world regardless of whether the players are from the NHL or other elite leagues around the world,” said a spokesperson for NBC in a statement.
On the women’s side, where the Americans are the defending gold medalists from the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, USA Hockey does not face the same roster-building dilemma. But the buildup to Beijing hasn’t been without its hiccups. On Monday, USA Hockey cancelled the team’s game against the Canadian women’s national team in St. Paul, Minn., due to unspecified “concerns around Covid-19.”
The teams are due to face off two more times in early January in Alberta, but it is unclear if spiking infections on both sides of the border will imperil those contests.
—Lillian Rizzo contributed to this article.
Write to Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com
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