Burnside: Ryan Miller reflects on being a cautionary trade deadline tale
It’s early west-coast time when we catch up with retired veteran netminder Ryan Miller. He’s just got his little guy, a first-grader, off to school. His wife, Noureen DeWulf, is nine months pregnant, and the arrival of their new daughter is imminent.
Miller is also dipping his toe back into the game. A decade or so after helping out longtime NHL goaltending boss Kay Whitmore with downsizing goaltenders’ gear, Miller is working again with Whitmore, consulting with the league on a host of goaltending issues, from equipment and goalie interference to other items related to the position.
“It’s kind of everything,” Miller said. “It’s a chance to contribute to the conversation, just take a good, hard look at where we’re at with things with goaltenders as a whole. I’m just helping out where I can.”
Miller is also keeping his options open vis a vis a different way of staying connected to the game on the team level. He was an assistant coach on Mike Sullivan’s staff with Team USA before the NHL pulled the plug on participating in the 2022 Games in Beijing.
The 41-year-old native of East Lansing, Michigan is one of the greatest American-born goaltenders of all-time and starred in one of the most dramatic international events in U.S. hockey history, the silver-medal effort in Vancouver in 2010, a tournament decided by Sidney Crosby’s golden goal for Team Canada against Miller a little more than a dozen years ago.
At some point, if Miller ends up working with an organization in a management role, he’ll also bring to bear his own experiences, including one of the most tumultuous moments in his career, which took place eight years ago leading up to the 2014 trade deadline.
It’s a story that gets repeated at this time of year whether it’s by management types in NHL war rooms or in bars and coffee shops as fans debate what their team should be doing – or not doing – come trade deadline time.
“I only had that one experience,” Miller noted with a chuckle. “But I’m sure that’ll get all those St. Louis fans nice and riled up “I would have liked that situation to go well, obviously, but my circumstance always comes up as the cautionary tale so to speak.”
He’s not wrong. And no doubt NHL GMs, starting perhaps with Toronto’s Kyle Dubas, are reminding themselves and their staffs about the Miller example and just how fraught with uncertainty acquiring a goaltender is at the deadline for contending teams.
As the 2014 trade deadline approached, Miller was nearing the end of a five-year deal he’d signed in Buffalo. He knew he was likely going to be dealt, In fact, discussions with the team about his future had begun the season before as the Sabres entered a period of rebuilding from which they have not yet emerged.
As the deadline got closer Miller, tried to prepare himself both physically and mentally for what would be a momentous change for him.
“As we approached the deadline I was trying to ramp myself up,” Miller said.
On Feb. 28, 2014, St. Louis GM Doug Armstrong sent a first-round pick, a third-round pick, William Carrier, Chris Stewart and Jaroslav Halak to Buffalo in exchange for Miller and Steve Ott, who remains with the Blues as an assistant coach.
Many, including this writer, believed Miller would be the final, missing piece to a Stanley Cup puzzle that had always eluded the Blues franchise. Still, as much as Miller tried to prepare himself for leaving the only team he’d known after the Sabres had drafted him in the fifth round of the 1999 draft, it was still a huge shock to the system.
“It turned out that it was a bit bigger moment than I thought, even now looking back,” Miller said.
There is always an adjustment period when a skilled forward or a top-four defenseman comes to a new team, especially at the trade deadline with six weeks or so left in the regular season. The transition is exponentially more difficult for goaltenders.
“A big part of goaltending is building a long-term trust with a group,” Miller said. “You’re getting to know the group. You’re building trust and goodwill amongst the players, even the fan base. There’s little things that you don’t really think about that play a part in a goaltender having success. You’re asking for a lot to come around in a month and a half or two months. It’s hard to replicate that quickly.”
Miller knows any discussion of his brief run in St. Louis may be seen as excuse-making or rationalizing. Still, he is good enough to address what happened in St. Louis, even though he certainly didn’t call me asking to talk about a particularly disappointing part of his stellar career – a memory that still rankles to this day.
“It was a moment in my life,” Miller said. “I wanted to go and have success. We can run down the whole reason why it didn’t work out. Did I not play to my potential? Did the team not play to their potential? I won’t go into excuse-making. It didn’t work out.”
The weird thing for Miller is that all those things that are the kind of quiet bedrock of integrating a goaltender into a new team happened in St. Louis. He loved the guys there and the organization. He still keeps in touch and developed friendships that continue to this day.
“I had a great relationship with the guys in St. Louis. I had a lot of fun there. They were a great group,” Miller said.
Still, it didn’t pan out.
And let’s keep some perspective on this. It’s not as though Miller collapsed in the six-game series against Chicago in the first round. It was rather the nature in which the series unfolded that has defined this narrative and Miller’s place in it. After winning the first two games at home in overtime and triple overtime, the Blues, who had finished second in the Central Division with 111 points, four more than defending Stanley Cup champion Chicago, lost four straight. The Blues scored just six times in those four games giving up 14 goals.
In 10 days, Miller went from missing link to cautionary deadline tale. It would take five more seasons for the Cup to finally come home to St. Louis, and it would happen behind unlikely Blues prospect Jordan Binnington, who came from well down the team’s goaltending depth chart to lead the Blues to the ’19 championship. Go figure.
“It sucked to lose in the first round when you’re a contender,” Miller said.
And even though much time has passed, it doesn’t make the memory any more palatable.
“It still sucks,” Miller said.
We’ve been thinking about Miller a lot in recent days. Can’t recall a year in which there has been this much goaltender talk leading up to the deadline, spurred by the sudden collapse of the goaltending in Toronto. Washington, Minnesota, Edmonton and Vegas have also had to ask hard questions about whether their puck-stopping is Stanley Cup caliber as the deadline has approached.
Which GMs are willing to roll the dice when the history of such moves turning is rare?
Miller has also done his own research and the evidence is almost indisputable: to win a championship means almost always having a homegrown goaltender or at least a goaltender who has grown up and established deep roots with an organization. Stanley Cup winning goaltenders don’t ride in at the trade deadline.
The last 10 Stanley Cup champs have all been backstopped by homegrown talent. Go back in time. Tim Thomas was older when he came to Boston – in fact he was originally drafted by Quebec – but the Bruins were Thomas’s first NHL team. Jean-Sebastian Giguere was a Hartford draft pick who bounced around a bit before landing with the Ducks’ organization in 2000, seven years before leading Anaheim to its only Cup win. Nikolai Khabibulin was acquired by Tampa in 2001, three years before leading the Bolts to their first Cup win. Pretty much every netminder from that point on has been homegrown.
If Miller is the cautionary tale, he points to Dwayne Roloson as the opposite side of the deadline goaltending coin. Roloson twice was traded mid-season, and both times it was an unequivocal success. At the 2006 deadline, Roloson went to Edmonton from division foe Minnesota and, were it not for an injury in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final against Carolina, Roloson might have led the Oilers to a championship. Five years later, Tampa GM Steve Yzerman added Roloson on Jan. 1, 2011, and Roloson took the Bolts to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference fina, losing in one of the greatest Game 7s we’ve ever covered to eventual Cup champ Boston.
But those Roloson-like moments are rare.
“As I start figuring out what I would like to do, I do reflect on it,” Miller said. “Maybe it would have been handy to have a little bit more of a ramp up with the team. It does make a difference to have time and familiarity. But that’s not what the trade deadline affords.”
Miller is no longer connected to the deadline as he was as a player, but he is no different than you or I. He is fascinated by what will transpire in the coming days and then in the days after the deadline.
“I’m like anybody else, I’m a fan,” Miller said. And the deadline has become like the World Junior Championships or the Olympics. “It’s become a defining moment in hockey. You shuffle the deck and you try and get hot. People like that. People enjoy that about the game.”