I wouldn't call Miller a head-scratcher, we were targeting him for over a year when we finally pulled the trigger. It just didn't work out. Now a lot of us didn't believe that he was final piece, but goalie was definitely a position we needed upgraded before we could win our Cup.
The Miller trade is the only time he's spent a 1st on a rental, otherwise he's reserved using 1sts to acquire guys with term left, JBo, ROR, Schenn.
Yeah, we were planning on re-signing Miller, too. This was similar to the Schenn, O'Reilly, Bouwmeester, and Faulk trades. DA's worst trades are when he's trying to get rid of a player (Oshie, Fabbri, Shattenkirk, Perron the fist time, Hoffman??), and when he spends picks on bad depth (Soshnikov, Paajarvi, Jokinen, Jerabek, Michalek, Leopold). When DA targets a specific player, he usually gets a good deal and a good fit. Miller just didn't work out.
True, but even if he had resigned Miller I think things would have worked out. Just look at how well he's played for a much worse Anaheim team since leaving STL. Miller had played his entire career in the ECF, he definitely needed an adjustment period to get used to the playbook on a lot of the WCF forwards. I was a big proponent of the Miller trade, but I wanted it to happen as soon as possible - not at the deadline. He was also the least weakest member of that Blues squad, his big crime was not stealing any of the games that the rest of the team failed to show up for.
I'd say we still need scoring though, and as long as Kyrou is out of the top 6, and Hoffman is a question mark, we do have a hole there as Sanford and Blais are just underwhelming when bumped up. And similar to when we went for Miller, I think we have too many other holes to make a serious run, so I don't think we should waste assets away this deadline. We need the Schwartz/Schenn/Tarasenko line to produce at a higher level, and then we need our bottom 6 to really up their game. The bottom 6 feels way more like our pretender years than our Cup year when each line excelled in their role and they all could still chip in and score.
I mean, it was an issue. Our goalies were similar to our center situation. Backes in his prime is a fine top 6 player on a Cup team, but not a #1 center. Elliott and Halak can win you plenty of games in the regular season and are fine starters on a playoff team, but they weren't ever to the level of Binnington on that Cup run. The bounce back ability and ability to steal games was huge. There were more than a few games on that Cup run that we would've lost if it wasn't for Binnington, I don't think any of our previous goalies would've been able to do that.
We're in that area again where we've got lots of pieces and we still have holes. We have scoring, we need it to be consistent and we need someone to step up and be a constant, dangerous threat. We're paper-thin on defense. As you note, that bottom-6 is nothing like what we had 2 years ago. How much of that is just Sundqvist not being here, I don't know. Doesn't matter, he's not in the lineup. Yes, on paper our 4th line could be Barbashev-Bozak-Clifford. It makes our 3rd line something like Blais-Thomas-Kyrou, which on paper you'd say "that could be a great line" but again, it just doesn't click and it's become an offensive black hole with Thomas not doing well even before his latest injury.
I remember Miller being really ambivalent about being here, and Armstrong was hoping he could sway Miller into sticking around. He wasn't, and he didn't care how the team did because he was ready to go home. He wasn't going to intentionally crap all over the ice, but he certainly wasn't going to go the extra mile for us.
