With the Dallas Stars dealing with massive COVID absences, their game against the Arizona Coyotes on January 2 has been postponed. This is the 81st postponement of the season, with more likely coming because of attendance issues in Canada.
The Stars are currently missing Luke Glendening, Jamie Benn, Roope Hintz, Joel Kiviranta, Jason Robertson, Michael Raffl, Radek Faksa, Ryan Suter, Esa Lindell, Miro Heiskanen, and Jani Hakanpaa. Many of those players should be eligible to come out of the protocol in the coming days if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms have disappeared, though they will still need to provide a negative test result. With that anything but a guarantee, the game for this weekend has been postponed.
With other postponements already in the books, Dallas’ next game isn’t until January 6 against the Florida Panthers, a date that should give them a reasonable amount of time to get most players out of the protocol and up to speed. For Arizona, things will resume on January 4 against the Winnipeg Jets.
Notice: they’re not worried about the health of any of these players, because they aren’t getting sick. They’re only worried about clearing protocols. Checking boxes is the priority. If it was health, they’d all be playing.