For the second time this season, the Colorado Avalanche has been forced to pause their season as they try to handle a COVID outbreak on the team.

Joonas Donskoi became the third member of the Avs to test positive in the last eight days. The league decided to have the Avs continue to play despite positive tests from Bowen Byram and Philipp Grubauer.

Morning skates were canceled in all three cases but the other two, the Avs continued to play on. After the third one in a week, the NHL finally decided it was time to put a temporary pause on Colorado’s season as the next three Avalanche games (tonight vs. LA, Sunday vs. LA, and next Tuesday vs. St. Louis) have been postponed.

The Avalanche facilities will remain shut down through April 20 as the hope is the club practices the next day and then returns to play on April 22 for their scheduled game in St. Louis.

No decisions have been made on when those games will be made up on the back end but it would require the Avalanche to extend their regular season. The current schedule has Colorado finishing on May 8 in Los Angeles but the Avs already don’t have consecutive days off through that point so some decisions remain for the league.

Personally, I don’t want to look at “upsides” of this from a team perspective because we don’t know what the effects of the illness will have on any of the impacted players and I’m generally just wishing them well.

The Avs could have absolutely used the rest after playing 30 games in 54 days but this wasn’t the way you wanted to see it happen. Only good vibes for the players and their families.