I get that the optics are bad, I don't understand why they didn't just power through that as soon as the vaccines were available. Here's some napkin math:
there's about 900 NHL players in a given year, let's say you need as many support staff as players so 1800 to vaccinate the league.
- You take out 1800 full vaccinations from the pool, so 1800 more people are vulnerable to get the disease that wouldn't be otherwise
- to this point in Canada, we have about a 2.66% positivity rate (total number of confirmed cases by total population), so by taking those 1800 vaccinations out of the pool you're probably causing an additional 48 people to get the disease
- by having Hockey to entertain us every night, in a country that's seeing 5,000 new cases every day, is it a stretch to think that they would save 50 cases over the course of a season to offset the damage done because people now have something that will keep them home at night?
And that's assuming that no one from the states watches at all.