Rumor: Major screw up has caused one of tonight's NHL games to be cancelled.

The Blue Jackets must be furious.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 4 years ago
Rumor: Major screw up has caused one of tonight's NHL games to be cancelled.
Andreas L Eriksson/Bildbyran/Zuma

If I am the Columbus Blue Jackets I'm probably pretty furious about this. 

Although nothing is official at this time just yet, Columbus Blue Jackets insider Aaron Portzline is reporting that arena staff in Columbus has informed him that today's schedule preseason game between the aforementioned Blue Jackets and the St. Louis Blues has been cancelled. This comes as a major surprise given that NHL games are very rarely cancelled for any reason, much less when there is no emergency of any kind to report, but it sounds like there may have been a major screw up that caused this.

Now keep in mind that since none of this is official at this time we are still uncertain of exactly what is going on here, so take the remainder of the information we're going to be providing as rumor for the time being, rather than fact. Portzline reports that he has heard that the issue are related to travel at this time, however some other reports are suggesting that this may somehow be related to work visa issues, something that seems very strange to me. 

Update: It now appears as though Portzline has been able to confirm the source of the problem and as I suggested earlier this whole work visa stuff sounded very off base. According to Portzline the real issue appears to be a mechanical issue with the charter flight that was booked by the St. Louis Blues, and furthermore Portzline has been able to confirm with the Blue Jackets that the game between the Blues and Blue Jackets has officially been cancelled. 

Obviously this is terrible news for the fans who were planning to attend the event and who had already purchased their tickets to do so, and it gets even worse. The Blue Jackets, according to Portzline, will not be wasting their day away and instead will hold a practice in Nationwide Arena at 3:30 pm today, but that event will not be open to the public which means all the fans going to the arena today are completely out of luck. What makes this so bad for the fans is that this announcement comes just 2 hours before the game was scheduled to start, and I fear that many will not get the message until they show up to the building. 

Hard to say how much the Blues are to blame for this one, but certainly Columbus getting cheated out of their final game of the preseason has to hurt.


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