Everybody wants Darnell Nurse gone, and that includes Darnell Nurse, who has submitted a short list of destinations to Stan Bowman and made clear that his time in Edmonton is finished. This could be a clean exit but who exactly is on the other end of this deal?
Because the market for a $9.25 million defenceman who no longer plays like one is not what people seem to think it is.
Four years remain on the contract Nurse signed in 2021, and teams looking for a new defenseman this summer are aware of that. They're aware of the numbers he put up last season and they're running the math on what it costs to absorb that production at that price for that long. Most of them are coming up with the same answer.
No thanks.
Naturally, salary cap retention starts coming up.
If Edmonton wants to make this trade happen, the current environment suggests the Oilers may need to retain somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of his salary just to get a team to the table. That's roughly $2 to $3 million committed to a player who is no longer on the roster, eating into cap space the organization desperately needs to address other things, all for a return that probably wasn't worth that much in the first place.
If the Oilers force this, they lose. If they end up retaining salary on an overpaid defenceman while receiving little return, they've compounded the original mistake of the contract with a second mistake designed to fix it.
So what's the alternative?
Darnell Nurse plays next season in Edmonton. It’s not what anyone wants, but let's remember what Darnell Nurse used to look like.
In March 2016, Nurse jumped Roman Polak at the San Jose blue line after thinking Polak had intentionally driven Matt Hendricks into the end boards. Polak never even got his gloves off. Nurse was handed a three-game suspension and began to become the player worthy of his current contract.
That was ten years ago. He's a husband and a father now, he’s older, more measured, further from the instincts that made him so respected. But does that mean the player is gone? Or does it mean nobody has tried to find him?
This is exactly the job for Mike Babcock.
Babcock was officially hired as the 19th head coach in Oilers history this week, returning to an NHL bench for the first time in years after clearing the NHL's investigation into his time in Columbus. The hire came with controversy attached and the organization absorbed the criticism that came with it. McDavid, Draisaitl and Hyman met with him directly. They told him they needed to be better and expected him to make them better. He told them he had no interest in coaching anyone who wasn't all in.
Babcock didn't get hired because the Oilers needed someone to manage players' feelings. They hired him because they needed someone to challenge them, to say the things the previous coach couldn't or wouldn't, to draw a harder line in a locker room that had grown too accustomed to losing important games without real consequence.
If there is a version of Darnell Nurse worth keeping, Babcock is probably the one who finds it.
The version worth keeping is the one that didn't wait to confirm whether Polak meant to hurt his teammate. It's the one who made players think twice in the neutral zone. It's the one who got suspended for being too aggressive and seemed entirely unbothered by that.
That player, even a 31-year-old version of that player, is worth more to this team than a salary retention deal that pays four million dollars toward nothing.
Sometimes the problem isn't the player.
Sometimes it's who's doing the talking.
