That said, it’s still\u00a0a tough part of the business when you lose a long-time teammate like\u00a0Darnell Nurse \u2013 one of only three (Draisaitl, Nugent-Hopkins & Nurse) who McDavid has played with for his entire 10-year NHL career\u00a0spent wearing Blue & Orange.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very exciting, first and foremost, with the new guys coming in,\u201d McDavid said. \u201cObviously, it\u2019s disappointing to lose someone like Darnell and the rest of the guys, but it’s part of the business.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, it\u2019s hard to really put into words what Nursey has meant to not only me, but the whole group and everybody in Edmonton. So, extremely disappointed to see that happen, but at the same time, I\u2019m really excited about some new additions in a new coach and new players.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Oilers will have a new face behind the bench in Mike Babcock \u2013 an experienced head coach with 700 career wins and sits 17th in NHL history with 1,301 games in 17\u00a0seasons \u2013 whom McDavid, Hyman and Draisaitl are excited to have at the helm after meeting this offseason prior to his hiring to discuss how they can adapt and bring a Stanley Cup to Edmonton following multiple close attempts.<\/p>\n
At this stage of their careers, winning is all that matters, and a change in approach is something they feel can have the biggest impact and make them better players, says Draisaitl.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it’s just the time that we’re all at in our career, I guess the age that we’re at, and I think he’s the right guy to get us to where we want to get to,\u201d Draisaitl said. \u201cObviously, it’s a different look, a change in personality, but very excited \u00a0to learn from him, very excited to work with him, and yeah, like I said, very excited to get going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That said, it’s still\u00a0a tough part of the business when you lose a long-time teammate like\u00a0Darnell Nurse \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":830388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-830387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=830387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/830388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}