Oilers: Is the Darnell Nurse criticism fair after his long contract extension?

On Friday, August 6th, the Edmonton Oilers and Darnell Nurse came to terms on a massive 8 year, $74 million contract extension ($9.25mil AAV) that’ll see Nurse locked up until the 2030 offseason.

This is quite a massive increase in pay from his recent 2-year bridge deal that saw him paid just 5.6 million per year and is another in a parade of massive contracts that have been given out to top-pairing defensemen around the league in recent weeks (Seth Jones, Zach Werenski, Dougie Hamilton, Miro Heiskanen, etc).

As with anything Oilers-related, Twitter and the blogosphere have been lit up with a range of opinions in the days since with the general skew of said opinions being that it constitutes a substantial overpayment.

Personally, this isn’t an opinion that I disagree with. $9.25mil seems like an absurd chunk of money to commit to a player that most forms of analysis don’t deem a ‘superstar’. Of course, the market had been set by those earlier signings ranging from 8.45 to 9.58mil, but a contract can be both ‘market value” and ‘overpayment’.

However, I’m not here to discuss whether or not the contract is an overpayment or not. I’m aiming to address some of the more extreme criticisms/assertions made against Darnell as a player. Over the past few days, I’ve seen Nurse tarred and feathered with the broad brush of “bad analytics” and “awful defender”. He often has all his success attributed to his time playing with McDavid and, while there’s some validity to this line of argumentation, these kinds of broad strokes overlook a number of pieces of valuable contextual information. I’ll address each common criticism separately.