By Nicholas Carafa, @ncarafa
Photo by Aaron Bell/CHL Images
Darnell Nurse will be the first to admit that he used to drive former coach Bob Marshall crazy when he started chasing the puck all over the ice during his time in the GTHL with the Don Mills Flyers.
Though he has reunited with former Flyers teammate Max Domi, who jokes about him having the same habits, things are different now – the GTHL grads have an IIHF World Junior Championship gold medal around their necks.
“We were capable of doing some great things out there on the ice, but we’re still humble and realistic that it was going to take a lot of great hockey to win (this tournament),” said Nurse. “We pushed ourselves on a daily basis to capture this gold medal.”
‘A lot of great hockey’ meant Nurse and defensive partner Shea Théodore logged big minutes against top line players. Nurse thrived in this role throughout the tournament; he capped his dominant performance by outmuscling Russian forward Alexander Dergachyov to help Canada preserve its 5-4 lead in the dying minutes of Monday’s gold-medal win.
“Whenever you try to change your game and do a different thing, that’s where you get caught in trouble,” said Nurse. “You have to sit back and let the game come to you and just make smart, simple plays to help the team win.”
Patience and the presence of mind to avoid being caught flat-footed by Dergachyov are the kinds of plays that captain Curtis Lazar says come standard with players like Nurse on the back end.
“We (knew) our entire group of defencemen (were) going to step up and make those plays under pressure,” said Lazar, who finished the tournament with nine points. “When you’re playing for Canada you have the luxury of picking from tons of defencemen throughout the country.”
Nurse, who was named Canada’s best player in the gold medal game, finished the tournament with a plus-8 rating, one assist and 10 shots. The Edmonton Oilers draft pick was selected by his coaches as the team’s top defenceman and also earned a spot on NHL.com’s World Junior Championship All-Tournament Team.
In hindsight, it’s a good thing that Marshall insisted Nurse work on his defensive game during his time with the Flyers. As Nurse developed, he came to the realization that his combination of skating ability and size would inevitably allow him to be a dominant defensive force and, eventually, he could translate that into offensive success.
“It was a process. He just had to understand that the game had to come through him to get to the net,” said Marshall, now coach of the second-place Minor Midget AAA Toronto Titans.
“He was such a good skater, he was usually in the right position anyway, so it was basically getting him to understand to trust his position on the ice and believe good things will follow.”
The talk before this year’s edition of the World Junior Championship was the pressure Canada would face to end its five-year gold-medal drought while on home soil.
Nurse and the rest of the Canadian squad not only confronted that pressure, but embraced it to put forth one of the most dominant performances in the program’s history. The team never trailed in a game and outscored its opponents 39-9 en route to an unblemished 7-0-0 record.
“I don’t know if there will ever be anything that feels better than how I feel right now,” Nurse said after the game. “This is an incredible feeling, and I’m so fortunate to have had the opportunity to play (on) this team.”
