Prediction: This winter many NHL writers, commentators, podcasters and bloggers, not to mention San Jose Sharks fans, will claim that the Sharks won the Darnell Nurse trade.
I say this after listening to the reasonable and sane San Jose hockey writer Sheng Peng talk to Ayden Ganam on Oilers Now. Peng laid out in simple terms why the Sharks brought in Nurse and fellow veteran d-man Jacob Trouba, a move that brought much criticism to Sharks GM Mike Grier.
Asked for his opinion on the trade, Peng said: “I think for the Sharks, they really need to add veteran presence and also to establish Top 4 defensemen to their team. Last year, we’re talking about Dmitry Orlov and Mario Ferraro as your top defensemen. Frankly, that’s not a playoff caliber defence. The Sharks, while they were close, they missed out on the playoffs. But in acquiring Nurse and Jacob Trouba and Michael Kesselring, you can start to see the makings of maybe a kind of a league average defence. Maybe you have three Top 4 defensemen there, Nurse, Trouba and Orlov. It’s been a long time since the Sharks have had that many kind of like legit Top 4 defensemen considered league wide.”
San Jose is going hard to compete for a playoff spot, Peng said, by bringing Nurse and a free agent like Mason Marchment. “I think they are trying to dovetail it obviously with Macklin Celebrini emerging as a superstar player, a top five player in the league, and they don’t want to waste his time with too much rebuilding. Of course, you can rush it, but you can kind of move it along a little faster. And that’s what Mike did this summer.”
My take
1. The Sharks have a number of excellent young forwards in Celebrini, Will Smith, Igor Chernyshov, Collin Graf, and super prospects in Ivar Stenberg, Michael Misa and young d-man Sam Dickinson and goalie Yaroslav Askarov. Now they’ve added veteran toughness in Nurse, Marchment, Trouba and Kiefer Sherwood to go with rugged forwards Barclay Goodrow and Zack Ostapchuk.
What’s not to like about what they’ve done, including Grier’s efforts to bring in some solid veterans?
2. Is Nurse a solid veteran? There is no doubt that in the regular season Darnell Nurse has been, on average, solid for the Oilers. He’s always been an up-and-down player, but when he’s at his best, he’s a solid #3 d-man on most any NHL team. I suspect he’ll provide that same good level of play for the Sharks in the 2026-27 regular season, as well as win over many San Jose fans by standing up physically for Celebrini and the other talented kids. Nurse is hardwired to do that difficult, dangerous but necessary work.
San Jose still have $13 million in cap space so handling Nurse’s cap hit of $9.25 million this year is not a big deal for the team.
For all those reasons, it’s easy to predict that Nurse will do well this winter in San Jose and that commentators and fans will see this trade as a win — and maybe a big win — for the Sharks.
3. I’ve always said a Nurse trade could be a win-win-win, a win for Nurse, a win for his new team, and a win for the Oilers. I hold to that prediction now. That doesn’t mean, though, that others won’t focus, at least initially, on praising how well San Jose did in the deal.
For one things, the hockey mob in San Jose will be genuinely pleased with the deal and won’t be shy about voicing their opinion. For another, there’s sizable group of Eastern media that hate all things Oilers and will only be too happy to dump on Edmonton if things turn out well for Nurse in San Jose.
The anti-Oilers bias isn’t shared by all Eastern writers, or most of them, but there’s not enough pins in the world for some prominent commentators to stick into their Oilers voodoo dolls.
It’s all part of the fun of NHL tribalism.
4. As for the Oilers getting a win, they’ve already had one, moving Nurse’s contract without any retention. The fact he was moved “without any retention,” is a line that hits almost as hard as “the trade is one for one” on the day Taylor Hall was moved for Adam Larsson.
Edmonton has been desperate for cap space for years. Now it finally has some, and it’s used some already on a series of what look to be wise moves, signing d-man Ryan Shea and goalie Frederick Andersen and bringing back Kasperi Kapanen. If Shakir Mukhamadullin turns out to be a solid bottom-pairing NHL d-man, all the better.
5. But for Edmonton, this trade wasn’t mainly about cap space. It was mainly about Nurse’s annual crash in performance in the playoffs. In the last three seasons, Edmonton scored 96 goals and gave up 74 without Nurse on the ice in the playoffs. With him, they scored 48 and gave up 53.
If Nurse averaged out as a solid d-man in the regular season the past five years, in the playoffs he averaged out as mediocre-to-awful. He didn’t even play like a bottom-pairing d-man in the playoffs. He too often played like a player who didn’t belong on the ice, which is why the Oilers coaching staff reportedly thought about benching him for Game 7 of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final against Florida.
The real win for Edmonton will come in the 2027 playoffs if the d-man who replaces him does much better than Nurse did, which isn’t a high bar to jump.
playoff
6. Of course, there’s always the chance that Nurse will turn around his playoff performance in San Jose. That would be massive for both the player and the team. If that happens, and if the Oilers get no better out of Nurse’s replacement in the playoffs, then you can talk about an outright win by San Jose in this trade.
For now, though, get ready for lots of talk about the Sharks winning the trade through the 2026-27 regular season. And why not, at least if Nurse plays as well he can?
The key for the Oilers is the long game, what the Oil do at the trade deadline with the Nurse cap space and how Edmonton d-men perform in the playoffs absent Nurse. That’s where the real potential prize is for the Oilers in this deal.