Why do so many dangerous shots deflect on net off of Darnell Nurse?
Overall Darnell Nurse is having a fairly typical season. Overall he’s been a functional Top 4 d-man this year, doing OK against tough competition. And yet the fan outcry against Nurse, and media criticism of Nurse, has never been more intense.
In his career as an Oilers d-man, Nurse has been about average for an Oilers d-man when it comes to making mistakes on Grade A shots against at even strength, which isn’t such a bad result given that he has generally played Top 4 minutes, competing against tough competition, top opposing attackers who know how to make a defenceman look bad. He hasn’t been in any way a weak or poor d-man compared to other Oilers d-men, though he does tend to go into defensive slumps, including four straight playoff seasons in a row.
This year he’s making a slightly higher rate of mistakes leading to Grade A shots against at even strength compared to last year, but his image has taken a beating for a few reasons, first because so much is expected of the second highest paid d-man on the team, but mainly because far more of Nurse’s mistakes have ended up as goals against this year, often with Nurse making obvious and costly errors immediately before the goal against is scored.
Fans have a hard time forgetting or forgiving such obvious and consequential mistakes.
For example, in Edmonton’s recent loss to Anaheim, he gave up way too much gap to rookie Beckett Sennecke on the fifth goal, backing right into the slot for Sennecke to rip one.
Next he fumbled and turned over the puck, ending up high in the defensive slot not covering anyone on Anaheim’s 6-5 winning goal against the Oil.
In Friday’s 6-3 loss to Carolina, Nurse played a solid enough game and only made one mistake, but that mistake proved be costly, a puck deflecting in off Nurse and into the Oilers’ net as Carolina went ahead 2-1.
Why? Why? Why?
When that puck deflected in off of Nurse I found myself again asking a question that’s bothered me for years now: Why do so many dangerous shots deflect on net off of Darnell Nurse?
For years, Bruce McCurdy and I noted that seemed to happen awful lot, but we weren’t sure if that was the case or we were just imagining it. And then we started to count up those occurrences.
Since the 2019-20 season — as part of the Cult of Hockey’s Grade A shots research project that started in the 2010-11 season — we’ve been counting up not only Grade A shots the Oilers give up each and game and which players make mistakes on them, we’ve been breaking down the nature of the mistake into categories, such as allowing a slot shot, allowing a passin to the slot, allowing a breakaway, lost battles, missed assignments turnovers, weak backchecking, bad pinches, bad line changes and deflected shots on net.
We’ve found Nurse is about average when it comes to making mistakes on Grade A shots against overall, but if you look at both even strength and short-handed ice time from 2019 to present, you find that he’s had twice the rate of dangerous shots deflect off him on net compared to other Oilers d-men.
Such deflections are rare, about 25 Grade A shots against per year arise due to deflected shots, 174 in total over the seven seasons. But Nurse has made 63 of them, compared to 111 from all other Oilers d-men combined.
Nurse’s rate is 0.085 Grade A shots deflected on net per 15 minutes of icetime. For all other d-men, the rate is less than half that, 0.041 per 15.
Now you might think so many dangerous shots deflect off of Nurse on net because he blocks so many shots. But while Nurse’s rate is 0.085, the rate of fellow excellent shot blocker Mattias Ekholm is just 0.022 and rare of the NHL’s best shot blocker of all time Kris Russell was just 0.0029.
For as many shots as Russell blocked, hardly any of them deflected off him to torment Edmonton goalies. But that’s not the case with Nurse.
Why is that? For the longest time I attributed it to bad puck luck, but with numbers tracked over seven seasons, and with Nurse’s rate of such mistakes so much higher, I’m going to rule out bad puck luck.
My own theory relates to why Nurse is such a frustrating player to watch. Here he is, an absolute specimen with so many great attributes to play hockey. He’s tall and strong. He’s fast and agile on his skates. He can rip and pass and fire a hard shot. He’s ferocious when he’s at his best. Yet for all that he’s only an average Top 4 d-man, at best, out-performed by many less physically talented players.
It strikes me Nurse’s main issue is reading the game. When it comes to that critical skill, he’s below average for an NHL d-man. This is why he’s often giving up too much gap, as he did on the Sennecke goal. It’s why he’s also often either too keen to force a play in the neutral zone — even when it’s an iffy bet. His positional sense is below average, often leaving him too far away from the puck carrier and prone to allowing dangerous shots, or too close to the puck carrier and prone to getting beat by clever move or smart pass. And, in front of his own net, instead of having his timing right to block a shot, as a Russell or an Ekholm would do, he’s a bit off, not fully blocking the shot and not getting out of the way so there’s a clear shooting lane for the goalie to see the puck.
As a result, at a higher rate than any other Oilers d-man, he deflects dangerous shots on net.
deflected
What can Nurse do?
As a result of low points in Nurse’s reading of the game and overall performance in the playoffs, I’ll suggest that putting immense pressure on Nurse doesn’t work. Maybe it’s Nurse putting that pressure on himself, I don’t know. But it doesn’t work.
He’s got to play with confidence. He’s got to play intuitively. But he’s also got to make better reads.
Perhaps the simpler he keeps his game, the less he tries to do out there, the more he can focus on his basic tasks, such as maintaining solid gap control, boxing out opposing forwards in front of Edmonton’s net, guarding the front of his own net against slot shots and cross-seam passes, and quickly moving the puck to his forwards.
Maybe the answer for Nurse is to always make the safe, easy, obvious play, not try to win the game himself but to pick his battles wisely, thus ensuring he can win almost all of them.
If he can keep the game simple, his physical skills might well come to the forefront and help him raise his overall level of play.
But I’m not sure. I’m just guessing. I’m a fan who obsessively goes over Grade A shots to try to figure out what’s going right and wrong, not an NHL coach.
Nurse and his coaches are the ones who will have to figure out what’s what.
And as a fan of both the Oilers and the player, here’s hoping them the greatest of success.
Grade A
At the Cult of Hockey
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