When Darnell Nurse lined up by the blue line for the opening faceoff in Detroit on Sunday, the defenceman next to him was someone different — again.
Brett Kulak got the opening assignment alongside Nurse, just one of several shifts they skated together in that game and the one that followed on Monday in Columbus.
For Nurse, a new partner has become old hat so far in the nascent stages of this campaign. Kulak became the fourth blueliner Nurse has taken a regular shift with — and that’s not even counting penalty-kill and power-play partner Mattias Ekholm.
If this seems suboptimal for a defenceman, it’s because it is.
“It’s not ideal,” Ekholm told The Athletic. “Sometimes I see that, and I feel for him. He’s in a difficult position where you’re, first and foremost, worrying about yourself and trying to get your game (in order). You want to have a partner where you know where he’s at on the ice and you don’t really have to always look before you pass.
“It’s not easy to play with different partners every night. He’s been thrown a difficult task, but I think he’s been playing well.”
Who Nurse should play with was the biggest question mark entering the season for the Oilers after they traded his longtime partner Cody Ceci and opted not to match the offer sheet Philip Broberg signed with St. Louis. Even Vincent Desharnais, another right-shot defenceman with whom Nurse got minutes last season, wasn’t re-signed and is now with Vancouver.
The right defence position was viewed as the weakest on the team and the revolving door of players beside Nurse only emphasizes that point. There’s a need to upgrade that crucial spot before the trade deadline in March — and ideally sooner than later.
Ty Emberson, the return from San Jose for Ceci, was pegged as that player heading into training camp. But Nurse being slowed by an injury limited the duo to just one preseason game together. Emberson struggled as part of an awful night for just about every Oiler in the season opener and he didn’t even finish that game with Nurse. They haven’t been partners since.
Since then, Nurse has played most with Troy Stecher and frequent scratch Travis Dermott — neither of whom has been a mainstay in the top four in his NHL career. He’s taken shifts on his unnatural right side while with Dermott, a fellow lefty.
“Your angles are a little bit different. What you’re seeing is a little bit different,” Nurse said. “You’ve got to make some adjustments whether it’s skating more in certain situations and knowing where the puck’s going to go before you get it.”
That’s a lot of change. Even more so considering Nurse played almost exclusively with Ceci from January 2022 to the second round of the playoffs in May. And that was before Kulak entered the picture a few days ago.
“We’ve got a lot of possibilities,” coach Kris Knoblauch said. “I’m not going to say that we’ve got what we’re going to settle for right now.”
Nurse and Kulak played together for a bit during the Western Conference final with the latter playing his weak side. Ultimately, Kulak wasn’t comfortable on the right, which facilitated a switch to have Broberg play with Nurse in the Stanley Cup Final.
The fluidity is unlike anything Nurse has experienced in years. At five-on-five, he’s played 74:55 with Stecher, 46:42 with Dermott, 22:10 with Kulak, 14:42 with Emberson, 10:16 with Ekholm and 3:35 with Evan Bouchard, per Natural Stat Trick.
“Each guy has to play his best and do his job,” Knoblauch said when asked about Nurse’s role in that mix. “You look at the forwards. Leon (Draisaitl) has a lot of linemates. It’s talked more with the defence than it is with the forwards, but it’s the same thing.
“We just expect them to go play and figure things out.”
Perhaps Knoblauch has a point.
Maybe Nurse should be the type of player capable of elevating a lesser or inexperienced blueliner to form a formidable second pair. One look at Nurse’s gigantic $9.25 million cap hit should inspire that confidence.
But the contract can’t be part of that analysis anymore. This was a deal Nurse was always going to have trouble fulfilling. He earned it after the perfect storm of events. The Oilers bridged him twice — the second time so they could sign Zack Kassian — and then a career-ending injury to Oscar Klefbom gave him a bigger role. He responded with a career-best season. Finally, then-Chicago GM Stan Bowman reset the market for defenceman by signing Seth Jones to an eight-year, $9.5 million AAV contract in July 2021 after acquiring him from Columbus. Nurse extended with the Oilers a couple of weeks later.
It’s clear that Nurse needs the support of a bona fide top-four NHL defenceman. The early five-on-five data from this season from NST backs that up. He has 72 and 56 expected goals percentages with Kulak and Ekholm, respectively. Those percentages drop to 44, 27 and 25 next to Stecher, Dermott and Emberson.
Former colleague Jonathan Willis provided a further illustration on X of how the Oilers have fared with and without Nurse on the ice at five-on-five. The two most valuable seasons from Nurse came in 2017-18 predominantly next to Adam Larsson and in 2021 — a truncated, solely intra-divisional campaign. Nurse mostly played with Tyson Barrie, who led all NHL blueliners in scoring, and got 58 percent of his minutes in that situation with McDavid.
For the Oilers, season-by-season:
The blue line shows goal differential in Nurse’s 5v5 minutes. The orange line shows goal differential in non-Nurse 5v5 minutes.
Context (partners, time with McDavid) follows in the next tweet(s). pic.twitter.com/JpiqJT4AV3
— Jonathan Willis (@JonathanWillis) October 30, 2024
The lack of a name-brand partner for Nurse isn’t the only issue but the 29-year-old can’t escape criticism. Last season wasn’t good enough. Like the rest of his teammates, this season has had its ups and downs. The Oilers have been outscored 9-3 at five-on-five in Nurse’s 172 minutes and his 45.7 expected goals percentage is fourth worst on the team.
He’s tried to play with more edge than he had been.
“Being physical also brings out the skating element in my game because you want to close down things quick,” Nurse said. “You want to be in people’s faces. That’s an area of my game that I probably wasn’t happy with over the last year and a bit. I probably didn’t bring that element enough.”
It starts with Nurse. Still, there doesn’t seem to be a level he can reach to mask the issues on the second pair.
Finding the right partner is the most important task for the management and pro scouting staffs. They might have to pull a rabbit out of a hat because, as colleague Allan Mitchell has outlined this week, options appear limited and the Oilers have few desirable trade assets.
One option Knoblauch and assistant coach Paul Coffey can try in the interim is breaking up the top pair of Ekholm and Bouchard and sliding the latter over with Nurse. That was the plan going into last season with Jay Woodcroft and Dave Manson in charge. As with the Emberson experiment, that lasted just one game — an 8-1 beatdown in Vancouver in the opener.
As long as the status quo remains, there’s a high likelihood that Nurse will continue the grunt work of rotating with a few defencemen.
“I have appreciation for guys like that,” Ekholm said. “I talk to him a lot about it. I acknowledge it because sometimes I know it’s nice to get a pat on your back and knowing you’re a big part of this team and what you’re doing is not going unnoticed here.”
(Photo: Brian Bradshaw Sevald / Imagn Images)
