Ticking Time Bomb? Darnell Nurse said to have one of worst contracts in NHL. Hmm

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This in from The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn, his analysis of the Top 10 worst contracts in the NHL, with Darnell Nurse of the Edmonton ranked as having the fifth worst, better than only the Tyler Seguin, Seth Jones, Jeff Skinner and Marc-Edouard Vlasic’s deals.

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Nurse will be paid $9.3 million for the next eight NHL seasons.

Said Luszczyszyn: “He too has a roughly one-in-five chance of living up to his $9 million-plus deal where the biggest issue is contract length for a 27-year-old. Nurse also eats minutes and scores, but is probably not a true number one defender. The talent is there to be more, but the price tag is still too high.”

According to Luszczyszyn’s stat analysis, he’s seen reason in the past two seasons to be a bit more optimistic about Nurse. “In the short term, the deal may not be as painful as once thought.”

But he still sees major potential for Nurse to be vastly overpaid in the eight years to come.

My take

1. I’m more bullish on Nurse’s new contract than Luszczyszyn. I admire this writer’s work, but a number of factors lead me to believe Nurse’s contract is crucial to the future of the Edmonton Oilers and likely to pay off for Edmonton. Given Nurse’s lack of offence and his high salary, it’s not likely his contract will ever be seen as a great bargain, such as Leon Draisaitl’s contract is now seen and as Nurse’s previous NHL contracts most certainly were. But Nurse is a key player who will help the Oilers win playoff series for years to come. If the team wins a Stanley Cup, he’ll be a key figure in that victory.

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2. Luszczyszyn is a smart and sober analyst but his analysis relies heavily on on-ice stats, essentially ranking the player but how well the team does when he’s on the ice, as opposed to focusing on his individual play. This kind of analysis is popular and many folks put a great deal of weight on it when it comes to assessing individual players. I’m not one of those people. My take? The best way to go in assessing a player is to do intensive video review of that player’s game, to focus on how he performs in crucial moments of the game, such as the creation of Grade A shots and goals for and against, to take careful notes and to compare his performance to what we see from other players in similar roles. Obviously this is extremely time-consuming work and beyond the scope of any one individual to do for all NHL players. That said there are a number of individual stats that do give us a sense of the value of NHL d-men, namely their time-on-ice in various game situations and their point-scoring rates. If you analyze Nurse’s game in this manner, it’s clear he’s been a solid No. 1 d-man in the NHL for the past two seasons. Based on individual stats alone, Nurse ranks as the NHL’s fourth best d-man over the past two seasons. You might not like ranking and assessing players by time-on-ice and point scoring stats, but if you can find a list purely based on stats that better passes the smell test for identifying top d-men, I’d like to see your list (A more detailed explanation of this evaluation can be found in this post).

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3. His new contract will pay Nurse like an elite d-men, so for Luszczyszyn’s analysis to be proven incorrect, he’s got to also play like a Top 10 NHL No. 1 d-man, just as he’s done the past two seasons. There are a few older NHL d-men on my own list (above), such as Kris Letang, Brent Burns and Drew Doughty. But most of the Top 20 are closer to age 30 than age 35. Nurse will be 34 in the last year of this new deal, still young enough that there’s hope he can still play like an ace d-man. Certainly there’s no great cause for alarm in the first five years of the deal, at least if Nurse can stay healthy.

4. There’s one other factor that puts Nurse’s contract over the top for me. Leon Draisaitl is signed for three more years, Connor McDavid for four more years. If both players are going to be convinced to stay in Edmonton, it’s crucial that they are happy and content, things that only come to NHL players if they’re on a tight, well-run and successful team. The Oilers are looking more and more like a tight team, with McDavid, Draisaitl and Nurse the key leaders, but other players fitting in well. It won’t likely matter that McD, Drai and Nurse are good friends if the team fails to keep winning playoff series. But if they can do so, the allure of sticking together and seeing just how far they can together push for hockey success may well be prove to be an enticement for Draisaitl and McDavid to sign new contracts after their old deals are up. That Nurse is already locked for eight years might well help pave the way for Drai and McD to stick around.

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