Unsurprisingly, Darnell Nurse wasn’t on the ice when the Edmonton Oilers skated in Montreal ahead of Monday night’s game against the Canadiens.
The defenceman was knocked out of Saturday’s game against the Toronto Maple Leafs because of a vicious hit to the head from enforcer Ryan Reaves. Nurse was bloody and shaken up from the play and needed to be helped off the ice while Reaves was issued a match penalty and was later handed a five-game suspension.
The Oilers still haven’t given an official update on Nurse’s status, but head coach Kris Knoblauch told the media in Montreal that the team expects him to be out for five to ten days. If that timeline is correct, Nurse should only miss four games because of a break the team has in their schedule next week.
Edmonton will play back-to-back games on Monday and Tuesday in Montreal and Ottawa, and then they’ll return home to host the Minnesota Wild and New York Rangers on Thursday and Saturday. After that, the Oilers will be off for five days before they hit the road to begin a three-game road trip through Utah, Colorado, and Vegas the following Friday.
With Nurse injured and Viktor Arvidsson still out because of an undisclosed ailment, the Oilers will again go with seven forwards and eleventh defencemen against Montreal. Ty Emberson has been elevated to the second defensive pairing alongside Brett Kulak, Travis Dermott and Troy Stecher were together on the third pairing, and Josh Brown was skating as the seventh defender.
The Oilers inked Brown to a three-year contract worth $1 million annually in the summer and the team opted to place him on waivers after an unspectacular showing during training camp. The rugged defender has two assists and a plus-five rating over 12 games for the Bakersfield Condors in the American Hockey League and he’s racked up a team-leading 46 penalty minutes.
Selected by the Florida Panthers in the sixth round of the 2013 NHL Draft, Brown has always been known as a physical, shutdown defender. He scored four goals and 21 points over 60 games in his final season in Major Junior in 2014-15 and helped the Oshawa Generals to an OHL Championship. He’s played in 290 games at the NHL level and has 34 points and 296 penalty minutes.