from Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff,

ll of the excitement surrounding the NHL’s return to the Winter Olympics this February for the first time in eight years has been tempered by the COVID-19 caveat.

“I’m super pumped, but it’s still like a long ways out,” said Philipp Grubauer, when asked about the opportunity to defend Germany’s silver medal from 2018. “You never know what’s going to happen with COVID.”

“It seems like if we’re going to the Olympics,” American-born superstar Patrick Kane said.

That’s just the world we’re living in right now. Everything is fluid. That’s true on paper, too.

When the NHL announced a joint agreement with the NHL Players’ Association and the International Ice Hockey Federation on Sept. 3 that the league will be pausing for three weeks to send players to Beijing for the first best-on-best competition since the 2016 World Cup of Hockey, the language at the end of the press release stated: “The Agreement allows for the possibility of a later decision to withdraw in the event evolving Covid conditions are deemed by the NHL/NHLPA to render participation by NHL Players to be impractical or unsafe.”

So, what exactly is the threshold that would allow the NHL to pull out of Beijing?

NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told Daily Faceoff on Thursday that a “material disruption to our season” would trigger that ability to withdraw.

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