I agree with the last statement - I don’t think we should take anything about culpability for the Miller-Pettersson relationship away from the fact Miller was traded.I mean, Miller obviously crossed some sort of line in November in response to his benching.
There are probably 4 separate things in play here :
1) The Miller-Pettersson relationship, whatever that was.
2) The Miller blowup, which might not have had anything to do with Pettersson directly.
3) The relative age and contracts of the players and who makes more sense to move from a business perspective.
4) The fact that post-blowup, Miller (who had always been the guy who had seemingly been more committed to staying here) was more than happy to get away from the media circus while Pettersson said he wanted to stay.
It's pretty difficult to say 'Miller was traded because he was judged to be the more culpable in the Pettersson relationship' when you have all this other stuff going on.
What I am struggling with is the idea that 1) he was justified in being hard on Pettersson because the latter was out of shape / lazy / etc, 2) he was friends with most of the team while Pettersson has a small circle, and 3) the team still decided to trade him for pennies on the dollar.
Even if you assume the team views Miller and Pettersson as equally culpable in their relationship, which seems to be the case given the public info, that suggests Miller crossed a line with Pettersson too. But then 1 doesn’t tip the scales one way or another.
3 seems tenuous because they’ve also emphasized the need to compete in the short term to keep Hughes around, and with the return they could have got for Pettersson they would have been in much better shape for doing so. Especially if doing so is going to piss off a bunch of players whose buddy just got traded to keep the malcontent loner around - seems like a good way to ruin team chemistry.
4 is too late to be explanatory because they were already looking to move Miller in November.
To me that leaves your item 2, something else entirely between Miller and teammates, or management is dumb. I don’t buy management being dumb, so either 2 was really bad, or there is more to the story we haven’t heard between Miller and at least some others.