The Los Angeles Kings and the Edmonton Oilers have a shared history that runs deeper than four straight first-round exits and a trade that shook the hockey world. The two teams have recently swapped players, including Warren Foegele, Viktor Arvidsson, and Corey Perry. They also share a general manager in Ken Holland. Holland ran Edmonton for years, getting the Oilers ever so close to the promised land, but also signed the contracts that still haunt that roster.

He now steers the ship in LA with a team slipping towards mediocrity. That overlap is not just an interesting footnote; it actually might be the most actionable piece of leverage Holland has this offseason.

The Kings are on the precipice of a major downslide unless they address their Achilles Heel. Their blueline either needs gutting or, at a minimum, two new defenseman. While the likelihood of either remains low given the trade protections of five regulars, there is a move worth expanding on, given Holland’s history. The team is also looking at a massive void down the middle of their forward alignment, but until they address their d-core via trade, free agency, or buyout, no other move matters. 

The trade worth having is Cody Ceci for Darnell Nurse, one for one. And before you dismiss it, hear it out.

Cody Ceci being on this Kings’ roster, at this moment in this franchise's transition, is the wrong piece in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the numbers are not subtle about it.

Amongst 123 NHL defensemen who have logged 3000-plus five-on-five minutes the last three seasons, Ceci ranks in the bottom five to ten in virtually every meaningful relative (team better with player on or off the ice) metric, including dead last in shots for%. Scraping near the bottom in Corsi, Fenwick, scoring chance rates, and high danger rates.

He does not make up for these pitfalls on special teams, aka, not an elite penalty killer, and does not see powerplay time. He does not generate offense, but what he offers is the area in between: reliable, professional, uninspiring minutes from a defenseman who doesn’t have premium skating ability to get the puck out of his own zone in a league that has made transition play the central skill of modern defense.

He is, by every available measure of relative on-ice effect vs off-ice on a team, one of the league’s worst despite a contract that says top-four fixture. Holland signed him in his first offseason, and it will follow this front office for a while unless something drastic happens.

The figure above shows the core functional issue with the Kings’ blueline. Two positive categorical players. Doughty is above the mean in all seven main categories for relative impact, breaking into the top quartile once. Clarke is a clear-cut case for number one deployment, breaking into the top quartile four times, but one metric below the median for relative impact on high-danger chances. However, the rest have specific functionality that prevents plausible deployment toward creativity and chance creation.

Instead, it's all about suppression and safe play, as three of the other four defensemen fail to break median in all but two categories, with Dumoulin actually failing to meet in any. One defenseman with elite offensive capability, one defenseman with median level offensive impact (though playing as the number one), and four without a paddle.

I have Nurse's relative impact also slated on the far right. It’s actually negligible and quite worse off than any Kings defenseman, but there’s more here than meets the eye.

Darnell Nurse gets more criticism than he deserves, largely because his contract sets an unreasonably high bar. He is not a number-one defenseman, despite the bar being set there largely during the upheaval of his draft slot (7th overall) and the franchise's direction at the time of his pick. He stopped being the future one of the blueline the moment Evan Bouchard broke out into stardom in a massive way and started eating top-pairing minutes. The team then acquired Mattias Ekholm, then Jake Walman, and, recently, Connor Murphy. The blueline had gotten crowded with players who easily eat 20 mins a night. 

But here is what Nurse is: a six-foot-four, left-handed, top-four defenseman who has excellent skating ability, can actually move the puck, and play with a physical edge that changes the temperature of a game. That physical edge occasionally rides the line — Kings fans need no reminder of what happened between Nurse and Phillip Danault, and neither does Quinton Byfield.

Point blank, he has been a core piece of an Edmonton blue line that, over the last five seasons, has three conference finals and back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals under its belt. You can argue about how much of that was Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl carrying the freight (those two led all forwards and defensemen in average TOI in their Conference Finals run in 2021-22), and you would not be entirely wrong, but Nurse played real minutes in all their deeper runs as he was not just a passenger. 

His contract is way too expensive for his current role, and Holland is responsible for that as well, having signed it during his Edmonton tenure, when Bouchard's ascension was not yet as visible. That mistake has staked Nurse as one of the most overpaid defenseman in the league and brough a slew of crticism.

That history matters here because Holland knows exactly what Nurse is, and he potentially does not need to be sold on it.

Edmonton's situation is straightforward. They have Bouchard, Ekholm, Walman, and, with last season, a shutdown defender in Murphy. Even in Ekholm’s increasing age, it’s a core that envies, particularly the Kings. The Oilers certainly wish they still had the services of Phillip Broberg, as his ascension likely made this hypothetical move easier on their end, however it’s still viable. They have a defensive core that no longer needs Nurse in the same capacity, as they’ve moved on from players who are defense-first, like Brett Kulak, and don’t need the secondary, or now tertiary offensive support Nurse provides, as he’s shifted mostly into a criticized shutdown role for $9.25 million.

If they can move that cap hit and come back with a player who fills a different kind of need: a defenseman who eats minutes, plays a shutdown role, and does not demand offensive deployment, there is a version of this that makes sense. Ceci, at $4.25 million, fills that role on a roster that already has the offensive engine. Edmonton is not paying for offense from their third-pairing right-hander. They need cap flexibility for the next two seasons of McDavid before full-blown panic sets in.

LA's case is much simpler. They simply need to be able to move the puck, and until they fix that all other problems move to the backburner. Their foundational problem is the blue line, and it does not have a complicated diagnosis. The Kings are among the worst transition teams in the NHL, with fixtures that prefer to rim it, glass it, regroup, and force forwards to chip and chase. 

In a league that punishes that style with increasing severity, it is a structural ceiling on everything the offense is trying to do. The team raised eyebrows last season with Artemi Panarin, and let’s say you find a way to acquire a center to support Quinton Byfield, that Byfield takes over Anze Kopitar’s role with ease, and the team can have one of the better wing groups in the Western Conference, but none of it matters until the blue line can actually get the puck to those players in transition.

Nurse does not fix all of that, as he is not a Brandt Clarke-level puck mover. But he skates better than any of the Kings' defenders by a country mile, and skates amongst the league’s best blueliners. He supports transition offense with the best of them; he plays left side, which is where the Kings have a gaping hole for offense, and he brings a physical presence that this roster has been missing since it started leaning soft in the Blake Postbellum. 

Pair him with Doughty, as the former Norris winner is still providing a high premium for defense, and let Nurse tap into being the number two offensive option, something he hasn’t done for the Oilers in a few seasons. Let Clarke run the first pair with Mikey Anderson as his safety valve and suddenly the blue line looks structurally different from it did just a few weeks ago.

The cap differential is real. Nurse at $9.25 million versus Ceci at $4.25 million is a $5 million swing. The alternatives elsewhere will inevitably cut into a very limited asset pool, or they will attempt a swing at a very thin upcoming free-agent market (see last offseason’s market for acquiring Ceci and Brian Dumoulin: that went over well). LA can point blank eat that difference, and Edmonton needs the surplus cap space to find the help Draisaitl and McDavid sorely need from the forward group.

As the cap rises, Nurse's salary is more digestible than it looks right now, and the Kings have the space to absorb it if they are disciplined elsewhere. Keep in mind, Kopitar’s salary is off the books, and the team will absolutely cut Doughty’s 11 million down to size in another season.  They will have to address Clarke's new contract this offseason, but it will likely fall closer to the Byfield extension.

The question is whether Holland is willing to eat that number for a genuine upgrade rather than a lateral move.

This is, at its core, a Ken Holland trade. He drafted Nurse; he created that hefty contract extension. He knows what the player is, what motivates the Oilers front office, and how to speak that language. If there is a GM in the league positioned to pull this off, it is the one who built both sides of the deal.

Despite Nurse having an NMC, the Oilers tried to move him at the recent trade deadline. The history that lives between the two clubs, which makes this feel awkward, is actually what makes it viable. Holland does not need three months of due diligence on Nurse. He needs a phone call to see if his former club wants to offload an expensive contract for a much cheaper, low-event, safety plug they are extremely familiar with in Ceci.

See, the Kings' defensive core is not just a problem; it is the problem. It’s the one aspect that makes every other upgrade feel incomplete. Moving Ceci for Nurse does not solve it entirely. The slippery slope of three of their offensively dry defenders still exists in Anderson, Dumoulin, and Edmundson. But you remove the worst offender, add a player who can actually skate the puck up ice, and you give the forward group, which is genuinely promising to work with, a chance to provide more than median, safe play offense.

Does Ceci have Edmonton as part of his no-trade list? I don't buy that given their history. Will Nurse waive his clause after years of criticism? It’s worth prodding at.

That is worth a $5 million premium. The question is whether Holland agrees before someone else starts making that call.