News out of Columbus today is that one of their star defenders, Zach Werenski, has re-signed with the team for the next three years at $5M per year. I think this is massive for the Oilers in that they will soon have a young restricted free agent of their own that will need a new contract. His name is Darnell Nurse.
If you’ve been following along this summer you’ll probably already be aware that I do not believe that the defender should be getting paid more than $6.5M per year on a new contract. He doesn’t bring enough offense to the table and to be honest, his defense is still lacking a bit at this point.
I wrote about it in detail here.
So when I saw Werenski had signed for $5M a year the first thing I thought was…
Oh my… Darnell Nurse's agent is NOT going to like this… #Oilers https://t.co/M19O6YLpDz
— BLH (Edmonton Oilers Enthusiast} (@BeerLeagueHeroe) September 9, 2019
Then I remembered this quote from Nurse’s agent from a couple of seasons ago when the Oilers were in negotiations for what turned out to be the bridge deal he’s currently on.
“If they’ve got $5 million in cap space (now), it’s not going to be a long-term deal,” said Thun. (source)
At the time, the Oilers defenceman was coming off of his ELC so you can understand why going from an 863k cap hit to one that was more than $5M per year long-term was a bit insane. Especially given his career-high in points was 26.
Fast forward to today, Nurse is on the last year of a contract that will pay him $3.2M this year. No doubt at the beginning of the summer he was looking at the Jacob Trouba $8M/yr deal and licking his chops, but now that we’re seeing his peers signing for smaller cap hits, I wonder what he’ll do?
Look at these comparables:
- Ryan Murray, CLB (25 yrs old) – 2yrs @ $4.6M cap hit per year. Signed in 2019
- Will Butcher, NJ (24 yrs old) – 3yrs @ $3.73M cap hit per year. Signed in 2019
- Noah Hanifin, CGY (21 yrs old) – 6yrs @ $4.95M cap hit per year. Signed in 2018
- Tyson Barrie, COL (24 yrs old) – 4yrs @ $5.5M cap hit per year. Signed in 2016
- Josh Manson, ANH (26 yrs old) – 4yrs @ $4.1M cap hit per year. Signed in 2017
- Samuel Girard, COL (22 yrs old) – 7yrs @ $5M cap hit per year. Signed in 2019
- Matt Dumba, MIN (23 yrs old) – 5yrs @ $6M cap hit per year. Signed in 2018
- Brady Skjei, NYR (24 yrs old) – 6yrs @ $5.25M cap hit per year. Signed in 2018
- Hampus Lindholm, ANH (22yrs old) – 6yrs @ $5.25M cap hit per year. Signed in 2016
- Colton Parayko, STL (24 yrs old) – 5yrs @ $5.5M cap hit per year. Signed in 2017
- Esa Lindell, DAL (25 yrs old) – 6yrs @ $5.8M cap hit per year. Signed in 2019
- Shea Theodore, VGK (22 yrs old) – 7yrs @ $5.2M cap hit per year. Signed in 2018
- Damon Severson, NJ (22yrs old) – 6yrs @ $4.166M cap hit per year. Signed in 2017
There’s NO WAY the Oilers can justify signing Nurse to anything more than $5M. Look at the players on this list that are considered offensive defenders like Barrie, Dumba, and Girard. The ceiling is six million dollars!
Without digging into the analytics, I would consider Nurse to be a solid two-way defender and by using the list above I’d say he falls into the same bucket as the Ryan Murrays and Josh Mansons of the world and they’re barely above four million dollars a year…
Anton Thun is going to have a helluva battle on his hands if he thinks he’s getting Trouba dollars for Darnell… He just doesn’t bring enough offense yet and if Jim Playfair’s word can be trusted (Playfair has been saying that he wants to put Nurse and Adam Larsson together to form a shutdown pairing), I think we might’ve seen the last of Mr. Nurse on the Oilers PP. So there go those cherry secondary points that he conjured up last year and it makes sense to do that with him. Edmonton has Joel Persson, Oscar Klefbom, Caleb Jones, Ethan Bear, and Evan Bouchard that they could use who are MUCH better with the puck on the PP than Nurse.
Now we wait to see what Ivan Provorov, Brandon Carlo, and Charlie McAvoy get, right? If they fall in around the same money as Werenski, that should seal the deal for Nurse. If he’s smart, he signs on the cheap and allows Ken Holland to work his magic with as much financial leash as possible.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
