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Darnell Nurse and the Edmonton Oilers dodged a bullet Tuesday night.
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The NHL’s Department of Player Safety only handed the Oilers defenceman a one-game suspension for his crosscheck on Kings defenceman Quinton Byfield Monday night at Rogers Place.
This means Nurse will only have to miss the meaningless final game of the regular season Wednesday night in San Jose and will be good to go for Game 1 of Edmonton’s playoff series with the Kings.
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Oilers fans were bracing for the worst, given that Connor McDavid received three games for a lesser offence earlier this season, but when it comes to NHL discipline nobody has any real idea of what the standards are.
The incident itself was pretty damning, though: Nurse crosschecked Byfield up high, drove him to the ice and then crosschecked him again in the back of the head while he is face down.
Nurse was given a five-minute major and a game misconduct, but given that there was no injury and that Nurse didn’t deliver the blow with any significant force, the NHL took it easy on him.
The NHL ruled that “while we agree with the assertion that this crosscheck is not delivered with exceptional force, it is only because of that fact that this incident is not met with much more hard discipline.”
A suspension that ate into Edmonton’s first-round series with the Kings would have had a catastrophic impact on Edmonton’s playoff fate. The Oilers are already down Mattias Ekholm, who seems done for the season. Jake Walman and Troy Stecher are also on the limp.
Nurse has been suspended three previous times and fined once during his 716 game career. Two of those suspensions have come in the playoffs. He missed Game 5 against the Kings three years ago for head-butting Phillip Danault and in 2023 he was suspended for Game 5 against the Vegas Golden Knights for instigating a fight in the final five minutes of a game.
E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com
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