NHL Trade Grade: Sabres acquire Colin Miller from Golden Knights
The Vegas Golden Knights have traded Colin Miller to the Buffalo Sabres for two draft picks. Here’s a quick look at how each team did in the trade.
The Vegas Golden Knights need to clear salary, as they are still over the salary cap. That’s the worst kept secret in the league. For the second time this week, Vegas made a cost-cutting move, trading defenseman Colin Miller to the Buffalo Sabres for a 2021 second-round pick and a 2022 fifth-round pick. Bob McKenzie had it first.
Miller has a $3.875 million cap hit and has three years remaining on his deal. The Golden Knights were able to clear his entire cap hit, which is huge. But even after doing so, they are still over the salary cap by about a million dollars, according to CapFriendly. They still have a few free agents, including Nikita Gusev and Malcolm Subban, to re-sign, by the way.
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Golden Knights
As I said earlier, this trade comes down to cap space for Vegas. If there wasn’t a salary cap, this trade likely wouldn’t have had to happen. But then again, considering Miller has fallen out of favor in Vegas, maybe it would have happened anyway.
Considering the situation the Knights are in, they did perfectly fine in this trade. It’s hard to get fair value for your players when everyone knows you have to clear cap space. In 147 regular season games with Vegas, he put up 70 points. Additionally, Miller had 10 points in 26 postseason games.
Vegas has enough defensemen to make up for his loss. But this isn’t good asset management by the Knights.
Grade: C-. Would have liked to see Vegas get more, but they pretty much killed his value by scratching him repeatedly and by running out of cap space. The Washington Capitals got more for Andre Burakovsky than Vegas got for Miller. That’s not a good sign.
light. Related Story. Grading Each Team's Draft Class
Sabres
The Sabres weaponized their cap space to fill a huge need. Miller got third pairing minutes in Vegas, but you could argue he deserves a longer look in an increased role. He moves the puck well and is better defensively than he’s given credit for.
Yes, he turns it over a fair bit, but let’s look at some of the defensemen who turned it over more often per hour this season.
- Keith Yandle
- Aaron Ekblad
- Brent Burns
- Morgan Rielly
- Erik Karlsson
- Charlie McAvoy
- John Carlson
- Mark Giordano
Miller handles the puck a lot, so he turns it over. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, and the guys listed above prove you can turn the puck over and still be an extremely effective defenseman.
The Sabres are in a good position to take a chance on Miller and see if he’s something more than a third-pairing defenseman. If he is, that’s lovely because Buffalo needs all the help they can get on defense.
And if he isn’t? Well, Miller’s a pretty darn good third-pairing defenseman. For $3.75 million a year, you’re not finding many guys who can do what he does for much cheaper.
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Grade: A. Sabres used leverage to get a very capable defenseman while giving up zero roster players or 2020 draft picks. That’s huge.