Quote:
Originally Posted by Locke
And the on-ice play is very different in comparison to real life.
I mean...I'm not going to tell you that if you put me in Nurse's shoes I'd have done a damned thing differently.
Nurse is a mediocre player at best. 3/4 Dman.
You know who else is giving that man $9.25M/year for $74 Million Dollars?
Nobody.
If someone is offering a player of Nurse's caliber that kind of money you sign on the dotted line, take the cash and start the car! Sure he'll never win anything, but $74M wipes away a lot of tears shed over a mediocre career.
So sure, he's brutally overpaid and I think he's a bad hockey player...but I cant say financially speaking that he's an idiot. That contract for him is like winning a lottery.
Take the money and run.
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This post sums it up nicely, but needs to be added onto.
somehow Ken Holland and the Oilers hockey department lost their fricken minds. Or they had a massive fear of the public effects of a drawn out contract negotiation.
It was a perfect storm for Nurse. We had that whacky covid schedule, where the Canadian teams were all pretty weak, but Nurse took advantage of that. On top of that he had a amazing outlier shooting percentage of 10.4 percent. Before that his highest in a full season was just above 5%. So basically he was hitting bodies out front and getting amazing bounces, and facing a weak division. That whole season was a fricken outlier, which the rational fans on CalgaryPuck screamed, its a complete fluke season.
But the Edmonton Hockey department might have looked at the stats and his previous performance and said, yeah he deserves a raise, but you know this looks flukey.
Nope instead they did what they always did, they looked at it from a how will that fans look at this and the press. Its like drafting a guy way about his position because he has a youtube video of his bouncing a puck on his nose while making seal noises. You have to draft his because we're playing the media.
I firmly believe that the Oilers hockey department and ownership is so dumb. That they believed that if they signed Nurse to top top blueline dollars that the fans and the media would believe they had solved their lack of number 1 defenseman or even number 2 defenseman problems. And now fixing that was a problem of two or three years down the road because "Look Nurse is making 9 million we believe that he is a number 1 defenseman and so should you". Stupid.
And what happened? Nurse who probably also worked hard in his contract year. We'll he didn't have pucks bouncing off shin pads and in. He wasn't facing weak opponents 3 out of every 4 nights. And his lack of hockey IQ, defensive brains in his own end showed back up the next year, and this year.
The hilarity of it is this. Darnell Nurse. He's Denis Gauthier with better offensive skills. That's it that's all, but Gauthier was better in his own end. But they literally signed Gauthier 2.5 for 9 million bucks a year. Absorb that, giggle at the lunacy. And then . . . . think about the fact that this wasn't a free agent deal. There was no pressure on then to do this. Hell they could have waited until deep into the next season to see if he actually was that good or a fluke.
And Locke's right, Nurse doesn't need to win anything, he doesn't need to stress and worry, they can't fire him. They can't trade him and even if they want to, he's in the drivers seat on that. They can't buy that deal out.
They crippled themselves, and Nurse can't hear them, he has a porche in each ear.