Anyone else here happy with Darnell's first NHL season? We threw him into the fire.
All in all, I'm happy with young Darnell. Nurse will be scary when he's 25. Lay a finger on 97, you are inviting a ****ing war you cannot win.
I was happy with his first year. His critics will focus only on his mistakes while his supporters will focus on his strengths. I fit in the middle. I noticed his mistakes at a pace of about 4-5 a game, 6-7 if you include bad penalties, but I also saw many great plays. Times where he would gather the puck deep in our zone and move it up the ice despite heavy fore-checking pressure. I am also pretty comfortable with the area in front of the net when he is on the ice. He usually has his head on a swivel, and he doesn't shy away from cleaning out the trash. On the other hand, he has a tendency to get a little too aggressive, and he does make some poor decisions with the puck in the neutral zone. He spends too much time trying to force a play and by the time he recognizes it isn't there, the opposition has closed off the simple play. Though, by the end of the season I saw much less of this.
What excites me is that we finally have a guy who skates fast and hits hard (wait until he fills out). One reason our skilled players were always exposed was our lack of a defenseman who could skate fast enough to crush oppositions skilled forwards. In 1-2 more years or so we will have a defenseman who can keep up with speedy forwards and absolutely erase them when the game starts getting chippy. You target McDavid, Nurse will target your top end player. Doughty has been doing it to Hall for years, and look how effective it has been. Gryba won't give you that, he's too slow, we haven't had an intimidating presence on the blue line in years.
The reason most teams target Nurse in the trade proposals is they don't want to have to play against him. Will he be a Pronger, he has the tools so we could call that his potential ceiling but lets be honest with ourselves, most likely not. From what I saw this year, and extrapolating his performance with 5 more years of development. I bet he is a #2-3 defenseman at his peak, with an outside chance at being a #1.