Robin Lehner Calls Out NHL Over Broken Promises to Vaccinated Players

Vegas Golden Knights goaltender Robin Lehner has called out the NHL over it's handling of vaccinated players. Lehner believes the NHL has not kept it's promises it made to players about loosening the restrictions once vaccinated against COVID-19.

Lehner met with the media and had this to say about what's gone on:

At some point, we gotta start looking at the mental health of people around us. Not just NHL, but everyone in society and see how can we start getting back to normalcy. Because the problem is gonna be huge, but being lied to us about things changing, to kind of force us to take the vaccine. Unacceptable. And to now when we have taken the vaccine to have the excuse of saying, 'Nah, we're not changing because of competitive advantage.' It's outrageous.

Lehner mentioned the NBA has loosened restrictions and allow for players to leave their hotel room on the road if they have been vaccinated. The NHL is apparently waiting for more teams to get vaccinated before they loosen restrictions, which once Lehner found out sent him fuming:

That made me go crazy, to be honest. ... We are humans as everyone else. So there's a two-fold problem for me here. The first one is we get promised something to take something that not necessarily everyone wanted, so that was a lie, a blatant lie. No one thinks about the mental impact, and there are people struggling," he added. "I know people will say, 'Oh, you're millionaires, this and that, you're crying, what about these guys.' We care about that too, man. No matter what people think, this is a society problem. But when government, corporations, NHL, whoever, are taking decisions in terms of these irrelevant things like a competitive edge over the human being, it's not OK man.

Lehner took to Twitter to clarify his comments and had this to say:

To put competitive edge before well being of people lives is wrong. As I said people are struggling with many different things mentally and we need to consider that as well. Then being lied to makes it worse. I love hockey and the league has done a lot of good things.
— Robin Lehner (@RobinLehner) April 21, 2021

I hope we can all work together to help people that suffers trough mental help from this going forward. I’ve heard how a lot of people are doing trough this as people talk to me about it.
— Robin Lehner (@RobinLehner) April 21, 2021