Sweeney: Bruins hope to play Thursday, fans will still be allowed

As an organization, the Bruins had been a bit off the radar over the past few days as they continue to deal with the fallout of several positive COVID-19 tests.

GM Don Sweeney talked to the media earlier this evening, mainly to offer updates on what’s going on and how the team is preparing to move forward.

As expected, Sweeney wasn’t able to elaborate on or pinpoint a source of the mini-outbreak.

“We’re doing absolutely everything we can with our extra point-of-care testing and everyday testing to eliminate all the variables that you possibly can...but you’re going to find, and you have found over the course of time that the virus continues to spread,” he said. “Then you kind of have to narrow down where it has. We’ve done some of that through the tracing and such, and then you just have an abundance of caution. You’ve seen it, in different times, where teams have had to take a pause, and that’s where we are. We’re in the middle of our pause and hopefully we’ve contained where we thought the initial test result was, and you go from there.”

At this point, the team is hoping to be able to get back to practicing at some point on Wednesday, and it appears that Thursday’s home game against the Islanders is (for now) still on.

“We do believe that we’ll have a couple of players that will be unavailable,” said Sweeney of that game. “The rest of the test results will determine who is available to participate on Thursday night, if we’re able to do so.”

Understandably, there’s plenty of unknowns at this point: will the Bruins play Thursday? Will they need to add the guys from the taxi squad? Who will be cleared?

What appears to be settled, however, is that fans will be in attendance on Thursday if the game ends up being played.

“The plan is to move forward with the twelve percent at the Garden,” he said. “All the people there under Amy and Cam and everybody has done an unbelievable job to prepare the building to thankfully welcome back the people that want to support our hockey club and the first responders and health care workers we want to be able to acknowledge.”

Sweeney also added that the quarantine pause didn’t affect the previously injured players who were not traveling with the team, including Brandon Carlo, who has been skating.

Basically, we’re all playing a waiting game at this point.

Further testing tomorrow and into Wednesday will determine whether or not the B’s are back at practice; after that, testing will also determine how many players are available for Thursday.

Until then, I guess all you can do is wear a mask, wash your hands, and keep your distance, right?