I'm surprised people think that Pettersson can return to form.
He's played the last 82 games at a 62 point pace.
Those 82 games are spread over 10 months, two different seasons and two different playoff series.
I'm finding it difficult to believe he can be a top 10 scorer again.
I'd favor keeping him if I saw him returning to form.
There's a good chance that both have peaked offensively, but I can still see Miller being a PPG guy for 3.6 million less per season.
I'd trade Pettersson to a team that believes that with a change of scenery he's going to be a top 10 scorer again and ask for a return that is commensurate with that.
So your theory is that at 26, having a bad year means he's just bad now?
What would be the mechanism for that?
A really unlikely and uncommon injury that lasts literally forever?
Or he's 'gotten his money and doesn't care forever now'?
The odds of him just being bad now are ridiculous.
Trading Pettersson during a funk is how you end up building a cup winner for another team and going down in the kind of infamy that gets talked about for 50 years.
Like if the Wings had traded Datsyuk in 06 for like Scott Gomez or something.
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I like Miller and what he's brought to the team.
He's also someone whom Vigneault laughed about and said, "He had a lot of growing up to do".
He's also someone who was somehow a throw-in in an already lopsided McDonagh trade.
He's also someone who was considered surplus to requirements for a team who could have just as easily dealt some combination of Palat and/or Killorn but considered them more essential to building a winning team.
If you follow the smoke it starts to seem like if Miller were a run of the mill 3rd line talent he'd be playing in Russia or something because he's prickly and hard to get along with. But he's one of those unicorn Gabriel Landeskog types who is big, fast, superlatively talented, a good playmaker, intense, and can exert his will on the game so he will get chance after chance after chance.
I like Miller and hope they can work things out. But to me, it's not remotely a question of which one I would keep. It's Pettersson all day long.