Random NHL thoughts: What will the Darnell Nurse trade look like? Also a look at the NHL Award winners

We have another trade request, and Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper earned a career achievement award.

We have our second reported trade request of the offseason, and this one is going to be fascinating to watch unfold in the coming weeks.

Just about one week after Dylan Larkin’s trade request with the Detroit Red Wings became public, word has come out of Edmonton that veteran defenseman Darnell Nurse has also requested a fresh start.

This one is not as surprising, mostly because Edmonton would almost certainly like a trade as well.

But what exactly is the market for him going to be?

And what sort of trade are we looking at here?

Is there an actual hockey trade to be made? Is Edmonton going to have to eat some of his remaining salary? Is it an exchange of bad contracts? Is Edmonton going to have to give up something of value to entice another team to take him and his contract?

Are you tired of all of these questions?

I can see all of these situations being completely within reason.

Nurse still has four years remaining on an eight-year, $74 million contract extension that began with the 2023-24 season. That comes with a $9.25 million salary cap number per year, which accounted for more than 11 percent of the salary cap the year he signed it. That is a lot. It is excessive given the player he has been and currently is.

He capitalized on one big breakout year that was perfectly timed for a contract negotiation, and then never really built on it. If anything, he regressed.

On one hand, the biggest issue with his contract is that it’s just simply been a bad value, especially under what was a mostly stagnant salary cap that was not increasing on a year-by-year basis. He was being paid like an elite defenseman when he was not really ever an elite defenseman.

On the other hand, he isn’t necessarily a BAD player that has no on-ice value. He’s an acceptable NHL player that, again, has simply had a bad contract.

But is there enough there for another team to want to take a chance on him?

Some things to potentially consider here:

• With the salary cap rapidly increasing in the coming years, we need to recalibrate what contracts look like and what good and bad salary cap numbers actually are. A $9.25 million salary cap number in 2026-27 is not even close to the same thing as it was during the 2023-24 or 2024-25 seasons. Just consider the percentage of the cap his contract will be over the next two years:

• 2026-27: $104 million cap — 8.8 percent

• 2027-28: $113 million cap — 8.1 percent

• Assuming the cap keeps increasing, the 2028-29 percentage will be starting with a seven.

• If Nurse had signed a contract for 8.1 percent of the cap in 2023-24 his salary cap number would have been about $6.7 million per year. We probably would have looked at him a LOT differently in recent years if he were making something like THAT, as opposed to 10 or 11 percent of the cap.

• We are also looking at an offseason where somebody like Darren Raddysh, an extremely boom-or-bust player on the free agent market, might be looking at a contract in the $10 million per year range (or higher depending on the bidding wars). Do you feel better about THAT investment? (I do not.) Teams have salary cap space, contract values are changing under the rising cap, and that money has to be spent on SOMEBODY.

• Nurse can still provide some offense. His underlying numbers from an expected goal perspective are passable and usually above 50 percent. The biggest red flag number is the goal-differential. I would wager at least some of that comes from Edmonton’s consistently bad goaltending, overall poor 5-on-5 play, and the lack of a regular quality defense partner for him. When it comes to the latter point, his most common defense partners the past three years during 5-on-5 play have been Cody Ceci and Troy Stecher. That’s not ideal for anybody.

• Basically, I think you’re looking at a passable top-four player with a top-pairing contract. You can work with that on a short-term basis. That is the good news.

• The bad news, aside from that being a less-than-ideal investment, is the amount of term still remaining on the contract, as well as his age. He is going to be 31 years old this season with a contract that is going to run through his age 35 season. While he might still be playable now in the right role, it is not a stretch to suggest that his best hockey, such as it was, is already in the rear-view mirror. How is he going to age over the remainder of that term? Will you still get something close to a return on that investment? If we were talking about a one-or two-year commitment I think the trade discussion is a lot easier. But four years of that, at this age, and at this stage of his career? That becomes a harder sell for a prospective team. That is where you might need to start talking about retained salary or Edmonton potentially having to give up a sweetener to take him.

There are a lot of layers to this, and it creates a wildly uncertain trade market.

There are a couple of different directions this can go, and the wild-card in all of this is the guy making the decision for Edmonton — general manager Stan Bowman — has an absolutely awful track record in dealing with potentially problematic contracts.

Sometimes making a good trade isn’t necessarily about finding the right player or even having the right talent evaluation.

Sometimes it’s simply about finding the right sucker to take advantage of.

Bowman is often times that sucker.

Let’s talk about that, as well as some thoughts on the NHL’s Award winners and the voting behind them. This award season continued the NHL’s mildly annoying trend of confusing single-season awards with career achievement awards.

It happened again.