Quoting: Wildwinswhen
I could see us doing this. It makes the whole lineup better in a way that Fiala wouldn't simply because Miller is a C.
Would we have space to sign him for 7-8M AAV on an extension? Even with letting Dumba walk and Wallstedt at G2 in 2023, we still need to sign Boldy and Rossi to extensions within the cap crunch timeframe.
I think Miller is just an objectively better player than Fiala (particularly in the playoffs), period, so aside from the positional value this would be a better roster, in my opinion.
We have about $20M in space next offseason with this trade. Say Miller gets $8M, that leaves $12M remaining. Russo's article today mentioned a possible bridge deal for Body around 2-3 years at $3-3.5M AAV. It was complete speculation, but let's say he's right and Boldy signs a 3 year, $3.5M AAV contract which leaves us $8.5M. Rossi is on his ELC for 3 more seasons including next and we are essentially free from any cap penalties due to Parise/Suter by the time his extension would kick in. For simplicity, I'll count ELC deals as $1M, so that's Rossi, Faber, and Wallstedt leaving us with $5.5M in cap space to re-sign/replace Gaudreau, Duhaime, Talbot, Kulikov, and a depth forward. I think all of those guys you could re-sign/replace with players around $1M AAV. There's probably an extra $500K or so due to my rounding on ELC's - either way it's tight, but doable.