The clock is ticking on the veteran defenceman’s time in Edmonton, with Nurse holding all the cards for one more season before his current no-trade clause morphs into a 10-team list to which he can dealt.
Conversations with several current and former employees all lead to the same place: the Oilers are ready and willing to trade Nurse as soon as they are able.
Sources confirm that Oilers GM Stan Bowman will be speaking with Nurse in the coming days about his wishes.
If Nurse, 31, says he wants to be an Oiler for another season, then trade talk will be shelved and the team will welcome him back for one more year. When he realizes that a trade is imminent, however, two sources have told Sportsnet that the Oilers’ preference would be to move Nurse before the start of next season.
Nurse declined an invitation to comment on this story, while Bowman stated that he would not speak to media before meeting with the player. And likely not afterwards either.
But Bowman has been quietly open to moving Nurse since the conclusion of the 2025 Stanley Cup Final, the second straight in which Nurse’s play disappointed.
There were discussions around healthy-scratching Nurse during the 2024 Final, when the Florida Panthers defeated Edmonton 2-1 in Game 7, Sportsnet has learned.
In the end, it was deemed that scratching a veteran and alternate captain would prove too much of a distraction. Instead, the coaching staff limited Nurse’s ice time to the point that he ranked last among the seven Oilers defencemen who played in that series, averaging just 15:51 of ice time per game.
That 2023-24 season, Nurse had ranked third on the Oilers defence with an average of 21:54 nightly.
As a stream of defensive coaches have lost their jobs in Edmonton — Trent Yawney, Jim Johnson, Dave Manson and most recently Mark Stuart, who was fired along with head coach Kris Knoblauch last month — Nurse has remained a stalwart in the Oilers’ top four.
One previous coach from earlier in Nurse’s career described him best, when he said, “I felt that he was receptive with the info that I was giving him at the time, but it never transferred into his play during the games. Especially when pressure was ramped up.
“He always gave you the feeling that he saw himself more as an offensive defenceman and would make some terrible reads with and without puck at critical times in games.
“Hockey sense was always a concern for me.”
At age 31, hockey sense will go down as Nurse’s great weakness — wherever he ends up.
There are things he does well — he is an above-average skater, he can be intimidating when he chooses to play physically, and he averages about 35 points per season with almost no power-play time — but at age 31, Nurse will never overcome two things: his lack of hockey sense, and the eight-year contract with an annual average value of $9.25 million that he signed in summer 2021.
It’s not that Nurse can’t play, can’t keep up, or can’t help an NHL team in any capacity. He is ultimately tradeable as a left-shot defenceman who can eat up minutes, with a contract coming back to Edmonton that some other team wishes to shed.
But the issue is simply that, over 798 regular-season games (and another 100 playoff games), he has found his place as a No. 4 or 5 defenceman. Those roles call for a salary in the $4-5.5 million range at most.
Typically, the salary of a third-pairing defencemen does not touch $4 million. A solid No. 4 with Nurse’s considerable leadership capabilities and popularity among his teammates could reach $5 million.
But the fact Nurse has spent the past four seasons being paid like a top-pairing defenceman has, in hockey’s strange way, afforded him ice time and opportunity that his game can not support. Even with the rising cap, Edmonton has decided that the balancing act must end — and will as soon as Nurse gives the go-ahead for Bowman to explore a trade, or his 10-team list kicks in.
Nurse’s contract calls for just $6 million in bonuses this season, and just $2 million in salary. That bonus is due during the season, however, so this will not be a case of the Oilers waiting to pay a July 1 bonus and trading a player with a high cap hit who is owed relatively little money for the coming season.
In a season where Jake Walman will be expected to up his ice time somewhat, while Mattias Ekholm will be asked to play a little bit less, Edmonton may have to find a way to fill the 20:58 that Nurse averaged last season.
That is, if Nurse decides, like the Oilers already have, that the time has come for him to move on.