Consider Eugene Melnyk relieved that NHL players will not be going to the Beijing Olympics.

In an interview with Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch, the Ottawa Senators owner reacted to the official announcement from the league and NHLPA Wednesday stating that NHL players would not be participating in the 2022 Winter Games.

“You don’t want your players to go over there and get hurt,” Melnyk said. “It’s a nightmare, I’ve lived it and it cost us the chance of winning a Stanley Cup.

“I don’t want to get caught again because doing it once was enough.”

Goaltender Dominik Hasek – 41 at the time –suffered an adductor injury during the 2006 Olympics while representing Czechia in Turin, Italy, and never played again for the Senators that season. He was one of the league’s best netminders leading up to the Olympic break, posting a goals-against average of 2.09 and a save percentage of .925 in 43 games.

Ottawa finished first in the Eastern Conference that year with 113 points but fell to the Buffalo Sabres in five games in the second round with Ray Emery seeing the majority of the time between the pipes. It would be Hasek’s only season in Ottawa as he returned to the Detroit Red Wings the following year.

“The thing that happened, that we all feared, actually happened [with Hasek getting hurt]. You don’t have a lot of chances to win a Stanley Cup. That was our year and that was our chance and it was taken away from us.”

Melnyk said that incident was enough to make him take a stand against NHL players participating in the Olympics forever.

“As much as I’m great patriot of Canada, it’s not fair to our organization or our fans to send players halfway around the world, in the middle of our season, to play on behalf of their countries,” he said.

Garrioch notes this isn’t the first time Melnyk has spoken out against NHL Olympic participation as he said in 2017 he would not let defenceman Erik Karlsson leave the Sens to play for Sweden in the 2018 Winter Games unless all NHLers ended up making the trip to PyeongChang. They didn’t, and won’t now until 2026 at the earliest, at which point the NHLPA said Wednesday they expect to bring NHL player participation back.

“Certainly, the players and hockey fans are quite disappointed. But playing a full 82-game season this year, something the pandemic has prevented us from doing since the 2018-19 season, is very important. We expect that NHL players will return to the Olympics in 2026,” the NHLPA said in a statement released Wednesday.

The last time NHL players participated in the Olympics was in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, when Canada took home the gold medal.