The National Hockey League made a bold decision on Wednesday. The league announced that its players will not compete in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China. While many hockey fans may be disappointed because they wanted to see some of the best hockey players in the world compete for their home countries, it’s the right move.

The NHL has postponed 50 games so far this season due to the coronavirus. The league is a business, and it should make those games up at some point so it doesn’t have to forfeit ticket sales from those games, as well as food, beverage, and merchandise sales, plus television revenue.

The NHL had a three-week break built into its season schedule in February to accommodate its players who planned to compete in the 2022 Olympics. However, now, it looks like it will need those three weeks to complete some of these postponed games. From a business standpoint, that makes sense.

Additionally, there are also a couple of problems with the host country: China.

The other problem from an NHL team’s perspective is the protocol China has in place if an Olympic athlete tests positive for the coronavirus. If a player tests positive for the virus in China, the player has to quarantine in the country for three to five weeks. That would result in players missing NHL regular-season games. Also, quarantining in an authoritarian country on the other side of the world for a month isn't too appealing.

And while the NHL didn’t have this in mind, it’s good that the league isn’t participating in the Olympics because of China’s politics. It’s a country that doesn’t respect human rights. The Chinese government has Uyghurs in concentration camps, shows little respect for human and labor rights, and is a political adversary of the U.S. Countries that put people in concentration camps don’t deserve respect and recognition from the rest of the world.

Not to mention, China is in many ways responsible for the coronavirus pandemic. If China handled the problem better in the first place, maybe there would be fewer cases and fewer deaths from it globally.

The NHL has its own problems to worry about right now, and it needs to focus on them. It doesn’t need to interrupt a season further that has already been interrupted by a virus that came from China.

Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.