Amongst the teams he played with were the Montreal Shamrocks, Vancouver Millionaires, Victoria Aristocrats, Spokane Canaries, and Seattle Metropolitans.

Nichols played for the Vancouver Millionaires from 1912 to 1916, though in the 1914–15 season when the Millionaires won its only Stanley Cup he was with the military and stationed in Asia on the ship RMS Empress of Russia at the outbreak of World War I.

[2] Back in the league for the 1915–16 season Nichols played one game with the Millionaires before moving on to the Victoria Aristocrats.

In March 1917 Nichols entered the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Forces and did not play for two seasons before making a brief comeback in the 1919–20 season with the Seattle Metropolitans, appearing in the 1920 Stanley Cup Finals.

[3] Nichols was born in Alexandria in the township of North Glengarry, Ontario in 1884, and he died in Los Angeles in 1957.