Last season, Sarah Nurse was riding high with the Toronto Scepters, coming off an inaugural season in which she racked up 23 points in 24 games. Unfortunately, she couldn’t match her totals last year after suffering a knee injury on February 6 while playing for Team Canada in the Rivalry Series against Team USA. Before her injury, she had recorded 12 points in 15 games with Toronto.
Vancouver Signs Trio Of Draft Picks Headlined By Jobst-Smith
Roster Preview: Which PWHL Team Will Have The Best Top Line This Season?
Roster Preview: Which PWHL Team Will Have The Best Top Line This Season?
She was only activated from LTIR on March 23 with only six regular-season games to be played. She only added two points to her total in those remaining games, finishing the year with 14 points in 21 games. Catching up with her at Team Canada’s training camp, I asked her if she was now fully healthy:
Yeah, I feel a lot better. I think anybody who gets injured during the season and has to rehab during the season is coming back with a pretty significant disadvantage because everybody’s playing all season and is pretty much in playoff form. For me, that was the toughest thing last year because I felt like I had kind of an awesome start to the year and then to get hurt at that point and to come back right before the playoffs…It’s hard to get over that, not only physically but mentally. So I took a lot of time this summer to fine-tune and strengthen, and got myself back to 100%.- Nurse on being 100% healthy.
Thankfully for Nurse, she didn’t require any surgery, but there’s no doubt the injury altered the course of her season, and maybe even her future. Who knows if she wouldn’t have been on the Sceptres’ protection list if the injury hadn’t derailed her season. In the end, Toronto decided to protect Renata Fast, captain Blayre Turnbull, and Darryl Watts in the expansion process, adding Emma Maltais as their fourth after losing Nurse in the exclusive signing window and Julia Gosling in the draft. On whether she was surprised about being left unprotected by the Sceptres, she said:
Yes and no —I knew they were going to have to make tough decisions…When I found out I wasn’t, I wasn’t like shocked, but of course I wanted to be one of the three at that moment. Once I figured things out, I was like, “No, this could actually be good for me,” and I think a change of environment and a change of everything is going to be super beneficial for me and my career.- Nurse on not being protected in the expansion process
The forward isn’t bitter at all about not being protected and won’t use that as extra motivation when playing her former team, adding that as a professional athlete, you have to find a durable way to be internally motivated. With so few teams in the league, it’s also important to beat them all if you want to do well in the standings.
Asked if she thought Vancouver and Seattle would be at a disadvantage being the only two teams on the West coast and having the extra travel she said she didn’t think so since their opponents would have to travel as well to play them and also added that the Takeover Tour games would be a bit all over this year, adding even more travel to the schedule. Six of Vancouver’s 30 games are currently listed as venue TBD, while Seattle has five, the Montreal Victoire has seven, the Scepters has five, the Boston Fleet has four, the Minnesota Frost has three, the New York Sirens has six, and the Ottawa Charge has four.
Nurse was impressed by the market in Vancouver last season when Montreal took on Toronto there. She recalls that from the moment they got off the plane, as they walked through the city, people recognized the players. She wasn’t sure what to expect going in, but at the actual game, the building was sold out, with 19,038 fans in the stands —the largest crowd for the PWHL this season —and it also surpassed the Vancouver Canucks’ top figure up to that point in the season. PWHL Vancouver won’t be calling the Rogers Arena home next season, though; they’ll play at the Pacific Coliseum, which has a permanent seating capacity of 15,713. Vancouver’s tickets have been selling like hot cakes, and Nurse is clearly excited about playing in the new market.
The forward is aware that some fans weren’t exactly pleased with the expansion rules. When asked what she’d say to those fans, she replied:
It’s obviously very unfortunate because you lose some of your favorite players to those expansion teams. You may think it’s very unfair, but I try to take a neutral stance because I see the expansion as super aggressive. Still, the league made it very clear that they want the expansion teams to be very competitive going into these new markets […] at the end of the day, that’s what the league wanted…- Nurse on the expansion process.
She added, however, that the rules may well change for the next expansion depending on how everyone does, because the league is learning as it goes. That’s a good point, since expansion rules are flexible. In the NHL, there have been many expansions, and each time the rules were revised, especially when the Vegas Golden Knights came close to winning the Stanley Cup in the very first season.
As for the upcoming Olympics, Nurse will clearly look to build on the success she had in Beijing when she led all scorers with 18 points in 17 games as Canada reclaimed the gold medal over the United States. She set new records for the most points in a single Olympic tournament (18) and the most assists (13), while becoming the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal in women’s hockey.
Follow Karine on X @KarineHains Bluesky @karinehains.bsky.social and Threads @karinehains.