On Tuesday, January 4 the Montreal Canadiens added four more players and an assistant coach to the NHL’s COVID-19 protocol list.
The additions of forwards Rafael Harvey-Pinard, Jess Ylönen, defenceman David Savard, goaltender Samuel Montembeault, and assistant coach Trevor Letowski to the list have brought the total number of organization members sidelined by the virus to 22.
As of now, the full list of players on the list is as follows.
Forwards: Rafael Harvey-Pinard, Jess Ylönen, Brandon Baddock, Paul Byron, Laurent Dauphin, Jake Evans, Mike Hoffman, Artturi Lehkonen and Tyler Toffoli.
Defencemen: David Savard, Louie Belpedio, Ben Chiarot, Joel Edmundson, Gianni Fairbrother, Jeff Petry, Alexander Romanov and Chris Wideman.
Goaltenders: Samuel Montembeault, Jake Allen and Cayden Primeau.
Coaches: Trevor Letowski and Eric Raymond.
To make a bad situation worse, the Habs have also been bit by the injury bug, with the following players on IR: Shea Weber, Josh Brook, Joel Teasdale, Josh Anderson, Tyler Toffoli, Christian Dvorak, Mathieu Perrault, and Joel Armia. Meanwhile, Alexander Romanov, Cedric Paquette, Carey Price and Brendan Gallagher are considered “day-to-day” with their injuries.
This mountain of absences has left Montreal with a virtually unplayable NHL roster.
But luckily for them, the league has just modified its COVID-19 protocol, reducing the isolation period after a positive test from 10 days to five days for fully vaccinated players who meet the required conditions. This means that the Canadiens, who play their next game on January 12, could very likely get all their protocol players back in the lineup in the coming days.
For the sake of curiosity, if the Canadiens were forced to play tonight, their lineup would look something like this.
Forwards
Jonathan Drouin – Nick Suzuki – Cole Caufield
Michael Pezzetta – Ryan Poehling – Alex Belzile
Kevin Roy – Lukas Vejdemo – Cameron Hillis
Alexandre Fortin – Jean-Sébastien Dea – Gabriel Bourque
Defence
Brett Kulak – Sami Niku
Kale Clague – Corey Schueneman
Xavier Ouellet – Tory Dello
Goaltenders
Michael McNiven
Kevin Poulin
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