It’s easy to get lost and spin out with the amount of bad news every day, so you have to take the nuggets of light where you can find them. A world-class dipshit like Zac Rinaldo being told to fuck right off by an NHL team and sent straight to the minors because he’s an anti-vax giblet is one of those times.
“Forward Zac Rinaldo, who we signed to a two-way contract this summer, is not vaccinated and because of that — and that’s his decision — the plan is to start him in the American Hockey League and he will not be coming to our training camp,” team president John Davison told reporters Tuesday.
Seems ol’ Zack, who signed a one-year, two-way deal in August, and his brain-genius ways thought it would be a good idea to give a speech at an anti-vax passport rally of morons the other day. It’s an interesting look for a player contracted to a team that just fired a coach for not being vaccinated, and made it very clear that to be part of the team you’d better get your shot. Rinaldo apparently wasn’t paying attention, and hence can look forward to a season of riding the buses in the AHL — back and forth, to and from, Cleveland.
Now it should be said that telling a player like Rinaldo to fuck off isn’t all that hard. He has absolutely no use on the ice, and is basically a detriment off it. One wonders what they might have done had Patrilk Laine showed up unvaccinated (it wouldn’t matter, Laine never comes within six feet of anyone anyway). It’s also a little curious that Rinaldo was sent to the AHL camp, as if he would be any less of an incubus there. But hey, hockey isn’t alone in thinking minor league players are disposable.
It’s a good look for Columbus and the league, especially the former as there were rumors and whispers last year that one of the reasons star center Pierre-Luc Dubois wanted so desperately to get out of town, and be willing to go to Winnipeg to do it, was that the dressing room was so full of MAGA chudheads as to be alarmingly unpleasant. Whether that was or wasn’t the case, clearly the organization is taking a hard stance against one tenet of that horseshit ethos.
The NHL has been just as hard on this, not having a mandate while kind of having a mandate. Life for players who don’t get vaccinated is going to be very different and much harder than for those who have, which is why deputy commissioner Bill Daly is claiming that 98 percent of the players will be vaccinated by the start of the season. For instance, those who aren’t vaccinated will not be exempt from travel restrictions between the U.S. and Canada, and will have to quarantine upon returning home, and thus teams can suspend and not pay any player who can’t get to practice and games because they’re quarantining.
The league is a better place without Rinaldo — who is a danger to any player that isn’t looking directly at him — and his kind who keep the game from moving forward. The fact that he found himself out on his ass because of his own stupidity is just that much sweeter. I’ll let my friend Sean sum it up: