For me, it's not about Kuzy getting Covid a second time that makes me want to ship him out; the issue I have is that this is another data point that he's not reliable. Covid twice, getting suspended for missing the team function, getting suspended for the cocaine mess, mailing it in during the bubble last year... this is a guy who can be a top player in the league and is paid to be this team's top line center and has put his teammates in a bad spot a handful of times at this point. At what point do you say enough is enough? They can't risk having ~9.5% of the cap continually dropping the ball.
I think there are still a bunch of unknowns about the most recent incidents, including whether missing the team function and him getting COVID are related. Did he miss the team function, and then get COVID going to a strip club or whatever high risk activity would land him in hot water? Did he miss the team function because he already contracted COVID again? As I said I suspect he did something high-risk in order to get COVID again, but we don't know for sure. I'm willing to let it play out.
The cocaine thing is bad, so no excuses there. But come on everyone except for Ovechkin and one or two others mailed it in in the bubble. Even generally reliable players like Oshie, Wilson, Eller, Hagelin, Hathaway, etc. all were terrible. Kuznetsov was actually one of the better players in the bubble.
And we still don't know how he got COVID the first time. We know they hung out in the hotel room, but AFIAK that's not how they got COVID. At that time there were no vaccines and cases were surging so it could have been a much more benign reason.
I'm going to generally defer to management on this one as they will certainly have more details than we do, but from what I know I think people are overblowing his list of faults. Especially after it looks like he's put in extra work on the ice this year to make himself a more well-rounded player.
