Analyzing Darnell Nurse’s future with the Edmonton Oilers

To continue my series on what the Edmonton Oilers should do with Darnell Nurse this offseason, I will talk today about the prospect of holding on to Darnell Nurse.

This is the outcome I would consider by far the most likely. Last week I talked about the fact that buying out Darnell Nurse would barely help the team at all financially. Next week I’ll look at the prospect of trading Nurse, but I just don’t see a lot of teams wanting to take on Nurse’s contract. So that essentially leaves the only option to be keeping him on the team.

At this point in time that seems like a big inconvenience. Darnell Nurse is coming off his slowest season since 2016–17. He has been trending down for three seasons in a row now, and except for the goal he scored on his own net, he put up zero points in the playoffs.

Keeping Nurse might not seem like a great option, but at this point in time I think it’s probably the best realistic option and here’s why:

The positives in keeping the defender

Despite the fact that Nurse put up zero points in the playoffs, at +4, he was third on the team in plus-minus. He is one of only seven players on the team with a plus-minus over 0. As compared to Evan Bouchard for example who had seven points in six games but still managed to be -7.

While it doesn’t change the fact that Nurse is making more money than he should be, there is some consolation in the fact that the cap is rising very quickly right now and will continue to do so the next few years. The current $95.5M salary cap increased $7.5M from last year, will increase $8.5M to $104M for next year. It will continue to increase another $9.5M for the following year. Nurse’s contract, which accounted for 11.21% of the cap when it kicked in for the 2022–23 season, will only account for 8.1% in two years. Moreover, there are rumours that the cap will continue to increase quickly. So while his contract has had the team in a headlock these past few years, they will see relief pretty quickly.

In the end, nobody would be too unhappy with Nurse if he was just making less money, or if he was weighing on the salary cap a little less. There is no doubt that his play could be better, but I still believe that he is better than his next best replacement currently within the Oilers system, whoever that might be.

Nurse’s stats aren’t spectacular but they are better than a lot of the league’s defencemen. If we look at goals against per 60 minutes while Nurse is on the ice at 5v5, and filter to only look at defencemen who played over 500 minutes this regular season, Nurse sits 145th out of 213. So not great by any means, but he is also above a lot of pretty solid defencemen, even some defensive defencemen. Some names that sit below him are Noah Dobson, Mikhail Sergachev, Brock Faber, Aaron Ekblad, Roman Josi, Quinn Hughes, Thomas Chabot, Morgan Rielly and many others.

So while Nurse is not perfect, by experience alone, he is likely better than any of the young prospects the Oilers might replace him with if he was injured for example.

The cons in keeping Nurse

The cons of keeping Nurse are pretty simple. Especially when considered next to the prospect of trading him. While Nurse is probably better than his next best replacement within the Oilers’ system, there are a lot of better options outside of the system that you might be able to get your hands on through a trade.

While Nurse’s stats aren’t awful (generally speaking he sits slightly below average), his relative stats are not great. Which is to say that his team does better with him off the ice than they do with him on the ice. This is true for essentially every on-ice stat. Now relative stats can be misleading because in any given stat approximately half of your team is going to be in the negatives, even a perfect team made up of perfect players is going to have players below zero (unless they all perform equally well in which case they’ll all be at 0). In some cases though, like in CF% and GF% he is bringing the team down a pretty significant amount. Another piece of bad news is that Nurse’s most common D partner, Jake Walman, is also pretty bad in these stats.

Another cause for grief with Nurse is that he doesn’t seem to gel with any other D-partner. Nurse spent over 100 minutes of ice time with Walman, Connor Murphy, Alec Regula, Ty Emberson, and Bouchard last season, and played with all the rest except for Spencer Stastney. For whatever reason it seems like he just doesn’t work well with any one else on the team.

Why it’s better to keep him

At the end of the day, I would consider Nurse staying with the team the most likely outcome, due to the difficulty in trading his contract and infeasibility of buying out his contract. Next week I’ll look at the viability of trading Nurse, but I’m just not sure it’s worth it if you’re going to have to sell the farm to offload his contract. If he has to play on the third pairing then he plays on the third pairing. We already know the contract is bad, trying to justify it by playing him higher in the lineup isn’t going to fix that.