The Edmonton Oilers will be without two veterans when the team’s training camp ahead of the 2024-25 season opens next week, per Tom Gazzola of YEG Sports Talk.
“Hearing that Evander Kane & Darnell Nurse are expected to start training camp on the shelf due to injury,” Gazzola said on Twitter. “Nurse has been on the ice for informal skates & continues to heal up a lingering injury from the playoffs. The projection is he will be good to go later in camp.”
The injury to Kane is known as it was widely speculated during the summer that the rugged winger would spend part of the season on the Long-Term Injured Reserve to give the team some added salary cap flexibility. The Oilers traded Cody Ceci and lost both Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway to offer sheets, so now they don’t need to use the LTIR to become cap compliant.
Kane scored 24 goals and 44 points over 77 games for the Oilers during the regular season despite playing through a sports hernia for most of the year. He added four goals and eight points in 20 playoff games before getting sidelined during the Stanley Cup Final.
Back in August, Elliotte Friedman reported that Kane was headed for surgery to repair the core muscle issue that had been plaguing him for months. However, the timetable for his return is still uncertain.
“I believe Evander Kane is going to have surgery. I think that one of the reasons it’s kind of taken until this long was because, I think they had some conversations about who was going to do it, which doctor, and I think they had to work that out,” Friedman reported. “Eventually, he’s going to have the surgery and he’s going to be out months. I’m not talking, like, one or two months. I think it’s going to be longer than that.”
The injury to Nurse occurred during Edmonton’s series with the Florida Panthers in June. He played just over four minutes in the team’s Game 2 loss in Florida after getting drilled into the boards by Panthers forward Evan Rodrigues. Nurse battled through the injury and scored three points while logging an average of 18:05 per night between Games 3 and 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.
After losing both of the partners he played with during the playoffs, the Oilers will need a healthy and effective Nurse on their blueline this season. As Gazzola reported, the expectation is that Nurse will be ready to play later in training camp, but the team can’t afford to rush him back and risk having one of their most experienced defenders play below 100 percent.
