After only the third game of the pre-season, one thing is crystal clear: head coach Jay Woodcroft is going to jam Evan Bouchard and Darnell Nurse together until it works or there’s plenty of evidence that the pairing won’t mesh. On September 24th, Bouchard played 24:55 and Nurse 25:18. On Wednesday night, Bouchard played 26:47 and Nurse 26:59. That’s a lot of minutes and it’s fair to ask if it’s too many.
Related: Oilers Must Be Patient with Philip Broberg’s Development
Ryan Rishaug, Rob Brown, and Jason Strudwick talked about these issues on the post-game Got Yer’ Back show and all argued that it is too early to be going this hard on both of those players. Brown wondered if this was what it was going to take to find out if this duo was going to be capable of playing top-line minutes against the opposition’s best players. He was concerned that maybe Woodcroft doesn’t see what he needs to thus far.
Bouchard and Nurse Edmonton’s New Top Pair
There has been a lot of talk heading into camp and pre-season that Bouchard is going to be placed with Nurse to allow for Mattias Ekholm to mentor a different younger player like Philip Broberg. The idea here is that Ekholm can work with Broberg and bring his game up, much like Ekholm did with Bouchard in 2022-23. It worked wonders as Bouchard exploded in after last season’s trade deadline and separating these two suggests that Woodcroft seems to think that Bouchard took from that pairing all he needed to. Time will tell.
In pre-season, the coach has been going with that pairing a lot — probably too much. To be playing each player between 24 -28 minutes a game, especially as the games are also taking place as a way to evaluate other players, what is the reason Woodcroft seems to be so adamant about putting them back out there? Why tax these blueliners unless there’s an issue?
Is Woodcroft Giving Them Reps, Or Is He Not Sold?
There are two reasons Woodcroft could be going back to Bouchard and Nurse so often. One could be that he wants to give them as many chances to build chemistry as possible. The second is that he’s not seeing what he wants and he’s going back to that well until both players figure it out. Early results in pre-season seem to suggest it’s the latter.
Bouchard made a great pass on the overtime winner by Connor McDavid on Wednesday, but otherwise, he had a rough outing. He was too relaxed, he whiffed on a couple of passes, he chose not to shoot when he could have and it was a struggle at times. Meanwhile, Nurse was up to some of his old tricks, took a bad and potentially dangerous penalty, and had a somewhat effective game. Neither was terrible, but their performance wasn’t what you need to see out of a top pair.
If Woodcroft isn’t sure, at what point does he pull the plug on this experiment?
Woodcroft Needs to Cut Back Their Ice Time
Acknowledging that Bouchard played over four minutes of power play time, this is too much ice time for both players. There are still five pre-season games left and 82 regular season games and there’s time to work out the kinks. If he keeps pushing at this pace, it’s very possible these players are going to be gassed. And, if they’re able to manage that much time, there’s always the risk of injury in a meaningless game.
One has to wonder what two or three extra shifts would do that 20 or 22 minutes per game wouldn’t do. Nurse said in a recent media scrum, “You try to build more and more and see where you can take it.” Clearly, these two players know what’s going on and that they need to work through any mistakes and jump any hurdles. Still, this is overkill and something that needs to be better managed.
