Nothing is done yet, no trade has been made, so let’s start by acknowledging that before anyone start lighting me up in the comments or arguing about what this unknown trade will look like. As of this moment, Darnell Nurse is still an Edmonton Oiler, but after Mark Spector and Elliotte Friedman reported that he’s given the team a short list of clubs he’d be willing to move to, it certainly feels like we’re getting close to the finish line on the Nurse era.

But before anyone starts dancing on his grave before a trade has even happened, I think it’s important to remember that Darnell Nurse was a good Oiler for a very long time. Maybe a trade happens happens quickly. Maybe it takes more than a minute to get done. Maybe the money situation is too hard to navigate, maybe the offered returns are awful, or maybe the Oilers look at what it will take to move him and decide they’re better off taking their time rather than rushing a deal through. All of those questions are on the table, but since we now know he’s open to being dealt, I wanted to take a minute to say goodbye to a guy who took a whole lot of grief around here even though SOME of it was a little much.

From my side of the laptop screen, I think Darnell Nurse has been a good Oiler for a long time. Full stop. That’s not me saying that he was anywhere close to perfect, and I’m not saying the contract wasn’t a problem. I mean, every single one of us has talked about his $9.25 million AAV a million times by now, and there’s no point pretending the cap hit didn’t change the way people watched him. Of course it did. Every mistake blew up on social media, there were plenty of rough patches, and when the Oilers were trying to win with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in the prime of their career, spending that much money on a d-men so inconsistent was a problem. That’s the cruel reality of the NHL, and the problem compounds when you’re talking about a team with Stanley Cup expectations and........

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