EDMONTON — Turns out they were with him, win or Ty.
The great Ty Emberson–Darnell Nurse experiment lasted 40 minutes. Two lousy periods — and oh boy, were they lousy — and now Nurse will have a new partner Saturday night when Chicago comes to town.
“Travis (Dermott) is going to have an opportunity for that spot right now,” head coach Kris Knoblauch said Friday, “and we’ll find out if it’s good or not.”
From the moment the Oilers traded Cody Ceci and a third-round pick to San Jose for Emberson — a 787-game veteran and his salary swapped for a 30-game newbie — the question was baked into the new season: Can this kid who no one had ever heard of play the big minutes required of a second-pairing defenceman?
Can he play predictable hockey next to, let’s face it, the often unpredictable Nurse?
By the time the Oiler emerged from their dressing room for the third period of their 2024-25 season opener, trailing the Winnipeg Jets 5-0 with the Nurse-Emerson pairing at minus-2, Emberson had been demoted to the third pair next to the steady Brett Kulak.
The new defensive alignment appeared to find a footing, albeit in garbage time against the Jets, and that’s what the Oilers will ice against the Chicago Blackhawks, as they try to find their identity on the heels of an embarrassing 6-0 season-opening loss to Winnipeg.
“There was just big mistakes. The mistakes that were made were big mistakes, and they led to Grade A chances,” was how captain Connor McDavid assessed his entire team’s Game 1. “Not to say that there was an insane amount of them, it’s just that the ones that were (made were) big ones.”
There’s a fine line between urgency and panic. Here in Edmonton, they’re not ready to panic — but you will see a heightened sense of urgency with back to back gamed against bottom feeders in Chicago and Calgary this weekend.
All pre-season long, Emberson practiced as Nurse’s partner. He was given a dressing room stall next to Nurse, and played the final preseason game with Nurse, when Nurse was finally fit to play.
Moving this Nurse-Emberson experiment to the backburner screams, “We don’t have time for this right now,” and that’s not close to being the only area that needs to improve.
“You want to see the game start to come together,” McDavid said. “We spent a couple weeks at camp, not a very good preseason. And obviously not a very good start the other day. You want to start to see the game start to come together at some point.”
It’s difficult to assess a team’s performance after it received the level of goaltending that Stuart Skinner gave them in Game 1. And it’s difficult for players to answer the media questions about everything that went wrong, when so much of it was submarined by the starter being ventilated for five goals on 13 shots.
But Emberson was visibly nervous in his first start, mishandling pucks, blowing zone exits, and generally receiving a round puck and beating it square before moving it along — too often to a Jets player.
“You can always say, ‘Oh, I’m not nervous. I don’t have any nerves,’” Emberson said. “But, first game with the new team, new crowd, new atmosphere, new systems… The first opening night.
“It’s a new speed from pre-season. So obviously, I would like to say no, but I think there’s always that nerves,” he admitted. “As it goes on, I think I’ll get more comfortable and have the game slow down for me.”
Emberson is in a near-impossible position, joining a team with Stanley Cup aspirations as a replacement for a beloved and trusted stay-at-home defenceman in Ceci. He’s played only 30 games, and they give him Nurse, who carried an injury through camp and is too far behind in his own game to help a kid find his way.
“Sometimes you do a switch to help an individual out,” said Knoblauch. “Sometimes you switch just to change things up for the team altogether.”
In our opinion, moving away from an experiment this prematurely is a signal that Knoblauch wants his team to find some semblance of its game right now — not two weeks from now. This signals that all experiments will cease until the ship is righted, after a lacklustre pre-season during which very little got sorted out for this team.
Installing Dermott, who has played about 300 more games than Emberson (most under the bright spotlight with Toronto), tells us that Knoblauch wants stability starting right now. It also means that the experiments will take a backseat to avoid a start similar to last season’s 2-9-1 debacle.
Overall, the Nurse-Emerson tandem was a metaphor for how his entire roster handled Game 1.
“So many times we had the puck, not under pressure, and just gave it up,” Knoblauch said, when asked what he saw upon reviewing the 6-0 loss. “Just the puck play, I thought that was the biggest culprit in our game.
“Everything’s a work in progress. We are still working with the lines, still working with the D pairs,” he said. “After a bad game, there’s a point where you’ve got to turn the page and let it go.
“(But) there’s also, ‘Well, what did we learn from that?’”
We learned that 40 minutes is enough, for now.
Emberson-Nurse can simmer for a while, until this team gets cooking again.