To compete for the Stanley Cup, Edmonton doesn’t need to bring in a lot of new players. It didn’t even need to keep Dylan Holloway or Philip Broberg, although that would have helped.
What it needs most is good health for its star players and for one key player, defenceman Darnell Nurse, to rise up and rediscover the fast, nasty and effective game that marked his play for so many strong seasons with the Oilers.
We rarely saw that game from Nurse as the season went along. Almost every Oilers defenceman improved a bit or improved dramatically under coaches Kris Knoblauch and d-man specialist Paul Coffey, But Nurse’s game collapsed, especially in the playoffs, where he was Edmonton’s least effective defender.
In the playoffs, several d-men paired up with Nurse but struggled badly, only to see them play safer, smarter, faster and better hockey when they were taken away from the Nurse pairing and played with another Oilers d-man. Two of those d-men, Cody Ceci and Vincent Desharnais, were essentially let go by the Oilers, as Edmonton decided to use its cap space elsewhere.
But there’s no moving on from Nurse, now in the third year of an eight-year deal that pays him $9.25 million a year. The contract has a full no movement clause for the next three year,s with a 10-team no-trade list in the final three seasons.
Nurse should be in his prime. He’s 29 this season. He’s played 640 regular season games and 72 playoff games. He’s at an age when a d-man should have mastered his reads and decision-making, while still having the speed, strength and good health to get the job done.
But in the second half of last season, Nurse came through with only a handful of top level performances in games. All too often he was the Edmonton d-man who leaked the most Grade A shots and goals against.
Paul Coffey worked wonders with Oilers d-men like Evan Bouchard, Mattias Ekholm and Brett Kulak, so much so that Edmonton now appears to be blessed with one of the top defensive pairings in the NHL in Bouchard and Ekholm. Kulak, too, trended up. If he can shift over to play on the right side, he’s got to be the top candidate to pair up with Nurse in the 2024-25 regular season.
There’s no reason why Nurse and Kulak can’t be a solid, defensively-sound and puck-moving pair, save for the alarming drop off in Nurse’s play last season.
In the regular season, if you compare Nurse’s individual contributions to Grade A shots against his individual mistakes on Grade A shots against at even strength, Nurse did OK, middle-of-the-pack for Edmonton d-men, -0.68 per game. In the playoffs, he crashed off a cliff to -1.55 per game. Any other d-man would have been benched in the playoffs with that kind of performance, I’ll suggest.
Can Nurse turn it around? Of course he can. His game trended up steadily from the time he entered the NHL as a 20-year-old in 2015-16. He worked his way up from bottom pairing to top pairing.
It’s hard to quantify exactly what Nurse has to do to improve other than to stop making so many poor reads and iffy, risky decisions on the ice, while increasing the number of excellent shots, passes and defensive stops he makes. He’s got to get back to where he was in 2019-20 and 2020-21, or even as recently as the regular season in 2022-23 under coaches Jay Woodcroft and Dave Manson. At his best, the good-vs-bad ratio tilted far more in Nurse’s favour. Most fans had little problem with Nurse’s play or Nurse’s pay that 2022-23 season, at least until he struggled in the 2023 playoffs.
There are still many fans who believe in Nurse and think he can turn it around. My bet is he’s got about a 70/30 chance of stepping up again. Those aren’t great odds for a d-man earning as much as he does on that kind of term, but it doesn’t appear like there’s any major physical issue with Nurse.
The key is his in-game decision-making, his reads. He’s done a much better job of making those reads in the past.
The Edmonton Oilers certainly need him to do it again. If he comes through as a strong No. 3 d-man on the team after Bouchard and Ekholm, it will be monumental for Edmonton’s Stanley Cup aspirations.
My bet is that between him, Coffey, Knoblauch and his defensive partners, Nurse will figure it out.
The ability is there. The health, fitness and intensity are there. The performance has been there before and can come back again.
Edmonton can replace Holloway with its great depth of skill, speed and hockey IQ at forward. It’s got young players like Matthew Savoie, Robby Jarventie, Vasili Podkolzin and Raphael Lavoie itching to seize some of the opportunity that would have gone to Holloway.
Broberg will be harder to replace, as the Oil lack depth at defence, but the Oil might have a replacement for him in Kulak or newcomer Ty Emberson.
What they need is a No. 3 d-man who can lead a shut-down second-pairing, while moving the puck smartly to Edmonton’s skilled forwards. Nurse can be that player. It’s not asking too much of him. His response will define Edmonton’s season.
How do you see it?
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