Darnell Nurse

Last Season

Seven goals and 17 assists in all 82 games — 24 points, minus-12, at 20:58 a night with 104 penalty minutes. His five-on-five work was done in Edmonton. His 798th career game.

The Finesse Game

Two hundred and thirty-one unblocked attempts from a median of 49 feet, nine per cent from inside twenty, seven goals. Eighty-eight goals in 798 career games.

Seventeen assists in a full season at twenty-one minutes a night is thin, and 324 points in 798 games is the honest rate of a defenceman who has been asked to be an offensive contributor and is not one.

The Physical Game

Six foot four, 215, and genuinely imposing — he skates as well as any big defenceman in the league and hits like it. A hundred and four penalty minutes.

The size and the feet together are why he has played eight hundred games. The decision-making under a forecheck is why the rest of it has been argued about for a decade.

The Intangibles

Forty-nine point four per cent of the expected goals, 47th percentile, and 48.5 per cent of the shot attempts, 40th, across 1,550 minutes, a genuine number-one defenceman’s workload.

The goals came out 67-68, essentially level, on a good Edmonton club.

He is 31, the seventh pick in 2013, and joins Trouba and Orlov on a blue line that is suddenly old, heavy and experienced in front of two twenty-year-old forwards. That is a deliberate construction, and it is the right one.