2026 Oilers Free Agent Frenzy Wrap
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July 3, 2026 by Ryan Lotsberg
After 798 games over twelve seasons, Darnell Nurse’s time with the Edmonton Oilers has come to a close. The seventh overall pick in 2013 was traded to the San Jose Sharks on Wednesday in a move that ended a relationship that had become rocky at best.
Nurse agreed to waive his no-trade clause on June 11. Sportsnet’s Mark Spector reported that the two sides were headed for a breakup on June 4. In that piece, Spector revealed that the Oilers considered scratching Nurse before Game 7 of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final, which tells me that the organization’s frustration with Nurse’s play likely began during the 2024 playoffs.
The next day, Elliotte Friedman shed more light on the situation on the 32 Thoughts podcast. He said that the Oilers asked all of their players with no-movement clauses if they would be willing to waive them after the 2025 Stanley Cup Final. Friedman noted that the conversation with Nurse at that time was quite emotional. He went on to say that knowing that the list of teams Nurse could be traded to would go from zero to ten next summer, the Oilers basically told him that he could work with them to facilitate a trade this summer while he still had the most control over his next destination or they would move him next summer when he would have had less control.
Oilers GM Stan Bowman clearly wanted to move Nurse. When it becomes clear that your employer doesn’t want you there anymore, it becomes real easy to move on. After being asked to let the team trade him twice, it became real easy for Nurse to grant Bowman his wish.
When asked about the decision to leave Edmonton in his introductory interview with the Sharks, Nurse was reluctant to reveal much about the decision other than saying derivatives of “it was just time for a change”. One reporter was able to pull a bit more out of Nurse though. I’ll let you watch the interview to find the full quote (13:40 of the video), but he talked about some of the criticism and the blame that he received from Oilers fans.
He acknowledged that there’s a certain responsibility that comes along with a high cap hit such as his $9.25 million AAV and there were a lot of times when he felt the criticism was warranted because he knew his performance needed to be better. He also said that there were a lot of times when the criticism wasn’t warranted.
Based on the information we have available to us, if you want to find the real reason Nurse was willing to accept a fresh start, we can look at that last sentence. He famously quipped that “…sometimes I feel like I’ve been blamed for everything from a goal against to the traffic on Stony Plain [Road]” during an appearance on the Mitts Off Podcast with Luke Gazdic on July 23, 2023. It was a humorous exaggeration, but he clearly heard all of his critics loud and clear. They were certainly loud, and they were consistent from the moment he signed his big contract onwards.
The Oilers gave Nurse two bridge contracts because they didn’t have the cap space to do a long-term extension. Part of that was mismanagement, but part of it was the realities of a flat-cap world and having to deal with long-term injuries to players like Oscar Klefbom and Mike Smith that impacted the team even after Nurse signed his big contract in 2021.
Nurse had his best season during the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season where he put up 36 points in 56 games and finished seventh in Norris Trophy voting, and then Oilers GM Ken Holland signed Nurse to the big contract extension immediately after that. He finished in the top twenty among NHL defencemen in even strength points in each of the three seasons before he signed the big contract. That contract at the same time as Cale Makar, Seth Jones, Zach Werenski, and Miro Heiskanen signed their contracts with similar AAVs to Nurse’s $9.25 million. Holland clearly should’ve waited to sign Nurse rather than signing him as soon as he was eligible to sign an extension, but hindsight is 20/20.
The next season, the Oilers went on their first extended playoff run. It was the first of a run of four seasons where the Oilers won at least one playoff round, including their two trips to the Stanley Cup Final in 2024 and 2025. Nurse’s playoff performances were highly scrutinized in all of those seasons. That clearly came to a boiling point within the organization in 2024 according to Spector.
Related: Deep Dive: Nurse’s 2024 playoff struggles
Fans always gave Nurse a hard time though. He was criticized for getting lost in defensive zone coverage too often, going down to the ice to block passing lanes when plays broke down near his net, icing the puck all the time, and poor decision making all over the ice. As someone who watched much of the complaining unfold online and in personal conversations, I can understand where Nurse’s traffic quip came from.
As Nurse said, some of the criticism was warranted, and people got carried away with some of it. Nurse commented that once people put the target on you, it never leaves you, and I think he’s right.
This is another example of the media and the fans in Edmonton playing a role in a player leaving the Oilers. Stuart Skinner had a similar experience to Nurse where he was the town whipping boy. Skinner was far from a perfect goaltender, but the complaints about him and the Oilers goaltending over the last few seasons were mentally exhausting even for me as an observer. I can only imagine how hard it is for a player to deal with that level of criticism and hate, especially when certain people involve family members in their hateful behaviour towards a player as happened with Skinner.
Ethan Bear was subject to racist comments from fans on social media after giving the puck away on the game-tying goal in Game 4 of the Oilers’ first round sweep at the hands of the Winnipeg Jets in 2020, and that played a role in his being traded to the Carolina Hurricanes that summer.
What happened with Skinner and Bear should NEVER happen. Those incidents crossed some serious boundaries. That’s a digression from the topic of Nurse, but it needed to be said.
Fans are allowed to have and express their opinions as they see fit. We live in a country with free speech. Having said that, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that players aren’t aware of how they’re perceived by fans. They might not sit and scroll through X like many fans do, but they know. That’s part of the deal when you’re playing in a hockey-mad market like Edmonton, but we can’t ignore the fact that athletes are human beings and the constant flow of negativity impacts them in ways fans don’t necessarily understand.
The media plays its role as well. They are paid to tell stories and to connect the fans to the teams they cover, and I realize that it’s not an easy job. However, they ultimately have control of the stories they tell. As Nurse said, negativity gets clicks and attention. I’m not saying that media members that are paid to cover the team or fan writers like myself shouldn’t call things as they see them, but the content that gets put out plays a role in creating the narrative that surrounds players and we can’t ignore the impact it has on players. I believe in fair and respectful criticism of player performance, not disrespectful and hateful commentary or interactions with the players.
Nurse’s comments during his introductory interview, clear excitement for a new start, and reluctance to go beyond the surface regarding his decision to agree to leave the Oilers clearly suggest that the negativity impacted his performance and his mental well being.
From a personal standpoint, I’m a bit sad that this is the way that Nurse’s time with the Oilers is ending. He was considered a key part of the core here for over a decade, and he has a place among the best defencemen to don an Oilers sweater. Nurse played the second most games among defencemen in franchise history. He leaves the team second among defencemen in franchise history in goals (88), fifth in assists (236) and points (324), third in even strength points (276) and game-winning goals (13), and second in overtime goals (6). He led Oilers defencemen in five-on-five ice time per game in every season but one since 2018-19.
Nurse was also quite heavily involved in the Edmonton community. He was nominated for the King Clancy Memorial Trophy four times for his work with under-privileged youth in Edmonton through Free Play for Kids and the Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation’s Every Kid Deserves a Shot initiative.
I sincerely wish Nurse all the best with the Sharks and for him and his family off the ice as well, and I thank him for all he did for the Oilers on the ice and for Edmonton off the ice.
This was clearly a necessary move for both sides though. Nurse will get a fresh start in San Jose, and the Oilers solved some problems. Having players carrying a mental burden like Nurse and Skinner clearly were last season will have an impact on the dressing room. Nurse was a leader and was well regarded in the room, and Skinner was liked by his teammates by all accounts, but there’s something to be said for moving on from players with clouds hanging over them for the sake of team morale.
Removing Nurse’s contract from the books obviously gave the Oilers some salary cap flexibility. The Oilers clearly felt it was time to move on from a hockey perspective as well. Nurse had his worst season since the early days of his career last season. I recently wrote a piece on the merit of moving Nurse where I broke down his game in great detail, so I’ll spare you those thoughts here. Nurse offered his own assessment of his game in his introductory interview for the Sharks, which was essentially that his legs are his greatest asset. His strength is his skating and his ability to cover a lot of space quickly. He excels at transporting the puck through the neutral zone and skating out of trouble.
Related: Deep Dive: Should the Oilers move on from Nurse?
He does not excel at passing. Upon reflection, the Oilers’ playing style asks players to move the puck up the ice as quickly as possible. It’s why they were known for being a “fast” team even when their average age was the highest in the league in the 2024-25 season. That playing style doesn’t fit with Nurse’s skillset. I think that’s the crux of why the situation with Nurse unfolded the way it did. The team was unable to get the most out of Nurse’s skillset. He had his best seasons when he was able to rely on his feet and he had the green light to carry the puck up the ice more often. His play began to decline when he was asked to move the puck faster.
That’s why the Oilers targeted a puck moving defenceman to take Nurse’s spot on the left side. The cap space the Oilers gained by moving Nurse allowed them to sign Ryan Shea to a five-year deal with a $4 million AAV. As I wrote on Wednesday, Shea is much better than Nurse at passing the puck. Shea excels at ensuring his team exits the defensive zone with possession of the puck. In other words, he moves the puck up the ice quickly. That’s a better stylistic fit for the Oilers than Nurse was.
Related: 2026 Oilers Free Agent Frenzy Wrap
Shea is also a better penalty killer than Nurse has been with the Oilers in recent years. It should be noted that new Oilers associate coach DJ Smith, who coached Nurse at the recent World Championships, said that he thinks Nurse is a great penalty killer but he hasn’t been able to play to his strengths in the Oilers’ PK systems in recent years. I don’t know if Shea’s penalty killing skillset will be a better fit under Smith’s penalty kill than Nurse’s was under previous Oilers coaches, but the data in favour of Shea’s penalty killing ability is encouraging.
Shea and Nurse are kind of similar defensively. NHL Sid (@NHL_Sid) wrote a great piece on Shea’s game from an analytical perspective on Thursday. The data shows that both Nurse and Shea struggle with rush defence because they play passively at their own blue line. If we base it on last season alone, they both struggle with in-zone even strength defence. Shea has had mixed results defensively in a short sample size of just three seasons, but Nurse has struggled in his own zone throughout his career.
I don’t think it’s fair to sit here and say that Shea is a better defenceman than Nurse. Shea had a breakout season at 29 years old, whereas Nurse has a twelve year track record of top four if not top pairing level play. However, Shea had a better season than Nurse last year and seems to be a better stylistic fit for the Oilers than Nurse was. Shea will certainly give the Oilers better value than Nurse did based on their contracts.
Bowman did well to move the entirety of Nurse’s $9.25 million AAV for the next four years off the books without taking a poor contract back. I also think moving on from a 31-year old defenceman with four years left at a high AAV is smart business.
I’m personally a little underwhelmed with the return though. The key part of the return was 24-year old former first round pick Shakir Mukhamadullin. Mukhamadullin played 50 games for the Sharks last season, and got twelve points. He’s still got a little bit of time to develop, but he projects as nothing more than a bottom pairing defenceman.
I understand that the Oilers would’ve gotten more of a return if they had been willing to retain some of Nurse’s contract, and I’m glad Bowman didn’t do that. I also understand that it’s a risk for a team to take on that contract. Having said that, the value of cap space is lower now than it has been in recent years due to the rising salary cap and it feels like that’s the biggest part of the return the Oilers got for Nurse, who I believe is a better player than he gets credit for.
I thought the return could go either way for Nurse. I thought there was a chance the Oilers could’ve gotten a better return based on some recent trades around the NHL, but I also understood the possibility of the return being low based on the contract being what it is. I’m underwhelmed, but not wholly disappointed. I’m not calling it a massive win like a lot of Oilers fans are, but I also don’t see it as a horrible trade. It’s just a mediocre trade in my opinion. Spinning it to say the Oilers got Shea as part of the package helps a little bit though.
The reality of the situation from the Oilers’ perspective is that they haven’t gotten the results they desire, and the team has been undergoing a renovation of sorts since the end of the 2025 Stanley Cup Final. The extensions signed by Leon Draisaitl and Evan Bouchard (which were both necessary pieces of business) necessitated some salary cap shaving last season, and the team predictably took a step back. The team is low on tradable assets because of their penchant for trading draft picks for immediate help every year, and they had an excess of quality left-handed defencemen. Trading Nurse was the way to redistribute excessive salary cap spending at left defence in order to make improvements elsewhere on the roster. It sucks that it ended the way it did with Nurse and the Oilers, but I think it will benefit both Nurse and the Oilers going forward.
