Darnell Nurse has formally accepted a trade from the Edmonton Oilers, and this morning Elliotte Friedman added a detail that shrinks the market considerably.
According to Friedman, the preference is an Eastern Conference destination, and the team that lands him almost certainly won't be a Canadian club.
Elliotte Friedman on Darnell Nurse's trade request: “I have heard the preference is East, and not likely to be Canada.”
That right away eliminates Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto from the conversation. All three would have had cap room and interest. None of them are in play, apparently.
The cap number alone makes this a complicated move. Nurse carries a $9,250,000 cap hit, and the production that comes with it stopped justifying the price tag a while ago.
In 82 regular-season games this season, the 31-year-old defenseman posted 7 goals and 17 assists for 24 points. He went minus-12.
Zero power play goals. Zero power play assists. For nearly $9.3 million.
Nurse's $9.25M cap hit makes him one of the league's toughest sells this summer
That contract is the problem. It's like trying to sell a house with a furnace that needs replacing: the bones are there, but the buyer has to absorb the cost.
In 6 playoff games against Anaheim this spring, Nurse contributed no goals and no assists. Zero points on the scoresheet. He did finish plus-4, which suggests he was at least on the right side of the puck.
Stan Bowman is the GM navigating this. The Oilers lost that first-round series to the Ducks, and now the roster rebuild conversation starts with an $18.5 million pair of defensemen.
Evan Bouchard gets the bigger bite of that at $10.5 million. And Bouchard is worth it, 95 points this season, a genuine offensive force from the blue line.
But Nurse, at $9.25 million, posted 24 points. The differential between those two contracts and those two production levels is glaring.
The East preference narrows the realistic landing spots to teams with cap space, a need on the left side, and a front office willing to take on that number.
That's a short list. And given that no Canadian team is apparently in the picture, it just got shorter.
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This one won't move fast. A deal of this size and complexity rarely does. The next few weeks will tell whether any Eastern team blinks first.
Should the Oilers retain salary to get a Darnell Nurse trade done faster?
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