Edmonton Spent Six Seasons Taking Ice Time Away From Darnell Nurse

Edmonton gave Darnell Nurse 77 minutes and 53 seconds of power-play time in 2024-25. It gave him 19 minutes and 24 seconds in 2025-26.

That is a 75 percent cut inside one year, made by the organisation that drafted him seventh overall in 2013. His total ice time fell with it, 22:22 to 20:58, the lowest of his last nine seasons. He finished with seven goals and 17 assists in 82 games, none of the 24 points on the power play, at minus 12 with 104 penalty minutes.

San Jose traded for him on July 1 and is paying him $9,250,000 a season through 2029-30.

The walk-down#

His ice time across the last six seasons reads 25:38, 25:03, 23:30, 21:54, 22:22 and 20:58. It fell in four of those five steps, and the year it rose it rose by 28 seconds. Nurse dressed for 47 playoff games across 2023-24 and 2024-25, so Edmonton was not setting a veteran aside while it rebuilt. It reduced him while it was winning.

The power play is where the reduction arrived all at once rather than in slices. He ran 1:01 a game of it in 2024-25 and 0:14 in 2025-26. He was still a penalty killer at the end, 1:29 a night across 122 minutes and 30 seconds, so this was not a staff losing faith in him generally. It was a staff deciding he was not one of the five men they wanted out there with an extra one.

Sam Dickinson played 72 games for San Jose last season at 19 years old and averaged 0:18 a game on the power play against Nurse's 0:14, and 21:57 of it across the season against Nurse's 19:24. San Jose's incoming top-paid defenseman took less power-play time last season than San Jose's teenager did.

What the money bought#

The contract is why he sits eighth in this series rather than fifteenth. San Jose sent Shakir Mukhamadullin and the prospect Zack Sharp to Edmonton and absorbed the full $9,250,000 with no retention. Nurse holds a full no-movement clause this season and a 10-team no-trade list for the three after it, and the deal carries $6,000,000 a year in signing bonuses across its final four years, which is the structure that makes a buyout unappealing to the club paying it.

So the club is not choosing whether Nurse plays. It is choosing how much, for four years, on a blue line where seven of the ten defensemen who dressed last season are gone and the team allowed 290 goals, third-most of the 32 clubs. He is $9,250,000 of the $30,373,750 PuckPedia has committed to six defensemen this season.

Professor Hockey, in his July 12 pairings video, called him "the Sharks new number one defenseman" who is "not actually top pairing." HockeyStatCards put Nurse in the 34th percentile offensively last season, the 47th defensively and the 33rd overall.

Best case and worst case, for the club#

San Jose's best case is that Edmonton was right and San Jose copies it.

A 20-minute defenseman who kills penalties, takes defensive-zone faceoffs and never appears on a power-play unit is useful on a team that allowed 3.54 goals a game. If Nurse does this season what he was doing in April, and Dickinson climbs past him in even-strength minutes while Luca Cagnoni or Michael Kesselring runs the second-unit point, San Jose gets a working second pair and a number one defenseman it did not have in August. Mike Grier told Curtis Pashelka in July that adding Kesselring, Nurse and Jacob Trouba meant the club would not "feel like we had to rush these guys and give them too much too soon." The best version of that is the veterans taking the hard minutes without taking the important ones.

The worst case is that the money decides the minutes instead of the play.

Nurse gets 23 a night and a power-play unit because he is the most expensive defenseman in the room. Professor Hockey's read of Ryan Warsofsky is that he "would default to" a veteran "in any clear-cut scenario," and that Nurse and Trouba get the highest-leverage shifts on the strength of their experience. Dickinson plays 17 minutes in his second season rather than 21, and Cagnoni plays here only when somebody is hurt. The damage is not that Nurse is a bad defenseman, because he is not one. It is that a 33rd-percentile season at 23 minutes crowds out the two players the next good San Jose team is built on. The money is not the injury. The money is the reason the lineup keeps getting written around it.

What to watch, October#

Power-play time on ice, against a baseline of 0:14 a game. It is in every box score.

Professor Hockey's August 28 opening-night units have Macklin Celebrini, Cagnoni, Will Smith, Alexander Wennberg and Mason Marchment on the first, and Michael Misa, Kesselring, Ivar Stenberg, Igor Chernyshov and Kiefer Sherwood on the second. Nurse is on neither. If he is on a unit in the first week anyway, San Jose has said it is deploying by salary before the deployment has earned anything.

The second number is the gap in total ice time, and I will put a call on it. Nurse averaged 20:58 a night last season and Dickinson 16:45, on different teams behind different depth charts. Across San Jose's first 20 games, Dickinson averages more ice time per game than Nurse does. Same table, one line each, scoreable in November by anybody with a browser. If the money decides the minutes, that call loses.

The stakes#

San Jose has not made the playoffs in seven seasons. The last berth was 2018-19, and this year runs 84 games rather than 82.

This site's open call from July 2 is that doing both the Trouba signing and the Nurse trade is an overcommitment whose bill lands around 2029. I hold it, and it needs a distinction it does not carry, because the two halves are not one argument. Professor Hockey, building his own alternate offseason on August 20, kept Nurse and skipped Trouba, taking Trevor van Riemsdyk on a shorter deal instead. The loudest public critic of the spend would have made this trade.

My own August 8 call says Dickinson finishes this season with a lower offensive-zone start rate than Nurse, which is the protection argument failing in public. San Jose's best case is that the call loses badly.

Yesterday: Six of Igor Chernyshov's twenty eight games ended with no shot on goal.

Sources: Ice time by strength, games played and career season lines from the NHL's own skater database and player records, read September 10, scoped to one club rather than to a multi-club season row. Contract terms, clauses and the July 1 trade from PuckPedia and CapWages by way of the club's cap file. The 290 goals against and its league position from Hockey Reference's 2025-26 tables. Ratings from HockeyStatCards. The pairings read, the alternate offseason and the opening-night power-play units are Professor Hockey's, from July 12, August 20 and August 28. The Grier quote is Curtis Pashelka's, Bay Area News Group, July 23.