The Rochester Americans announced last Thursday that their originally scheduled game for Friday, March 12 against the Cleveland Monsters had been rescheduled out of an abundance of caution in regard to American Hockey League COVID-19 protocols with the team. The very next day, the Amerks were also forced to reschedule Saturday's game against the Utica Comets due to a developing COVID-19 situation in the organization.
With the team being in quarantine due to COVID-19, the Buffalo Sabres at the National Hockey League level were left in a bind without an ability to call up players from Rochester in case they needed to.
After not practicing as a team or playing in game action for six days, Amerks head coach Seth Appert addressed the media on Tuesday about how his team has handled the COVID-19 situation.
"Certainly it's an unfortunate situation," Appert said in his opening statement. "We do have three positive COVID tests so far on our team.
"I do want to really make sure that we understand that our players have been nothing but exemplary in their on-ice work ethic and competitiveness, but also in their off-ice decision making and habits as they live their lives. This is an unfortunate situation. [It] happened at no fault of our players, and we've made the decisions that we made, in terms of postponing games out of abundance of caution, and to avoid a situation where we had a massive spread either to us or our opponents.
"We believe we [made] the right decisions after we found out about the one positive case to make sure we could contain this and limit the number of players that it spread to so this could be a one-week situation, not a three-week situation with a high number of COVID positive tests. ...Our guys feel they're in a safe environment. We have regular testing, our mask-wearing has been very strong, and our guys, our staff and everybody involved has made really good decisions throughout this to try and have a productive season, which we believe we've been having. We're excited to get back to it."
Appert was able to confirm that three players and one "support staff member" tested positive for COVID-19 dating back to Thursday, but the team has had a string of days where they've had nothing but negative COVID-19 tests across the board.
The first-year Amerks head coach believes that it was the team's quick actions that helped avoid a worse COVID-19 outbreak within the organization, or a possible spread to another team.
"We played Wednesday night in Utica, which was a fantastic hockey game to be a part of. ... We found out early the next morning that we had one positive," Appert said. "So at that point, a lot of discussions went in and we decided to keep players away from the rink that day, and started having conversations with our trainer and who's our COVID officer, [Amerks Vice President of Business Operations] Rob Minter, and [Sabres general manager] Kevyn Adams in Buffalo about the right course of action.
"We were all pretty aligned very quickly that let's make the smart, cautious decision, because who knows how many more. We felt good with our protocols that there wasn't going to be massive numbers, but the tough part about this virus is that you can have it and spread it, and then you're not testing positive for it yet. So we made that decision then on Thursday to keep the players away and to postpone those games. At that point, the goal was to keep the players away for four days, through the weekend, and then we'll re-evaluate as they're testing every day and we get more negatives or positives."
Back in late January, the Sabres played a weekend series with the Devils at KeyBank Center, despite the fact that New Jersey had a couple of positive COVID-19 cases pop up just before and during the two-game set. Two days later, both the Sabres and Devils found themselves with their seasons on pause with multiple players starting to test positive for COVID-19.
In the end, Buffalo had a maximum of nine players find themselves on the NHL's COVID-19 protocols list, while New Jersey ended up with 17 players, at one point, entering the NHL's COVID-19 protocols.
Appert acknowledged on Tuesday that Buffalo's situation earlier in the season helped the team in Rochester conduct a better plan of action to contain the spread of the virus.
"I think we all learned, and so did the NHL, from the situation between New Jersey and Buffalo, where that game probably shouldn't have been played and the number of cases could've been limited to a very few, and it maybe has a one-week impact instead of a much longer impact," Appert explained. "Like anything, you try to learn. You try to learn from your mistakes, you try to learn from others mistakes. I think we learned from that situation.
"By [AHL COVID-19] protocol, we technically could have played [this past] weekend. We made the right decisions that we felt that maybe there's one or two more that might come up positive in the days to come, and if we shut down now, we can limit it to a real few number of cases."
With the number of positive COVID-19 cases remaining low and the consecutive days of negative tests, Appert is optimistic that his team can get back on the ice as soon as Wednesday on a limited basis.
"Our plan going forward - We have had multiple negative days in a row now. [If] we have another negative day on our testing results coming back tomorrow, we will enter back on the ice in a small group situation. Then if we have another day of negative testing after that, we will return to full practice on Thursday, and then hopefully play on the weekend, but that's still to be determined."
As for returning to game action on Friday night, Appert believes that it's a realistic possibility, but that decision will be officially left to the people who make those types of decisions.
When approaching the time off to quarantine, Appert wanted to give his players the chance to recharge their batteries after a successful 10-game opening to the season, where the team went 6-3-0-1 to earn 13 points in the North Division standings.
"We gave the players a four-day mental recharge, so to speak, that we didn't do any hockey activity over Zoom or over the phone for the first four days - Mental break, recharge physically and emotionally," Appert said. "Then as we got into [Monday], now we started having more conversations with the players, individually and collectively, about their own game and how we want to move forward. I think the biggest message, collectively, is this will not be an excuse for us to not come out and perform at our best."
Friday's scheduled matchup with the Comets is set for 7 p.m. ET at the Adirondack Bank Center, and can be heard on 950 AM and 95.7 FM ESPN Rochester.
***Photo: Micheline Michaelina (@MiMiV4682)
