Building a Forest

The pricetag for tall defensemen & Carolina's bet on K'Andre Miller

With most of the major names in free agency going off the board early, there wasn’t a lot to talk about yesterday as it was mostly a wave of signings for middle of the roster players with a few high ticket prices sticking out (get that bag Mikael Granlund). Outside of Mitch Marner finding a new home, the story from the past few days is the rising costs of defensemen, particularly tall ones who fit more of the second/third pair profile or a penalty kill specialist role.

Everyone wants to mimic the champs and the thing everyone seems to takeaway from Florida is you need tall defensemen. Watching Niko Mikkola fly all over the ice and clear the front of the net probably influenced that. It has been a growing trend that you need a relatively tall blue line to succeed in the playoffs with Tampa having Victor Hedman as their rock for years and Vegas’ blue line all being over 6-feet. This ignores that Florida’s top blue liner in Gus Forsling is average in height for defensemen but I digress. This is the current theme teams are obsessed with and even the Panthers gave Aaron Ekblad an eight-year contract to keep him in Florida for the rest of his career, albeit at a hometown discount.

Combine this with the rising cap and the game is becoming more about paying the price for what you want and figuring the rest out later. You see it extending out to the depth players with Calgary giving Kevin Bahl a six-year deal close to what Jaccob Slavin got the last time he hit free agency. Nashville trading for Nicolas Hague and giving him a four-year deal at a similar cap hit also fits this category. They want a certain player type that they think you need to win, have more room to spend with the rising cap and thus you get some sticker shock with what these guys are paid now.

This has always been the case with defensemen starting back when Seth Jones got his monster contract that made him the third highest paid defenseman at the time (Aug. 2021). It was an unprecedented contract for a defenseman who didn’t put up gaudy point totals and was more known for his draft pedigree & logging a ton of minutes against the toughest matchups. His $9.5 mil. was a lot for his track record at the time, but prices for defensemen started soaring after that (see Nurse, Darnell) and teams are starting to pay more of a premium for middle of the roster players if they fit the mold they want now that they got more room to spend.

I always get annoyed at the “you need to build your roster like this to win” talk because it usually leads to overspending on a player type and not knowing how to get the most out of them like Pittsburgh did almost a decade ago or like Florida is doing now. Most of the time you’ll see a team sign a tree-like defenseman, feed him a bunch of minutes, watch him get caved in at five-on-five and wonder what they’re doing wrong. The coaching and development side of this always seems to get overlooked. They want the players Florida has instead of looking at how they can plug-and-play almost anyone into their lineup & get results. They have the foundation planted while the others are sticking apple trees in their yard hoping they can stay healthy. Mikkola, Schmidt, Kulikov and even Forsling becoming the player that he is now are good examples of this.

I’ve mentioned before how the forwards play a big role in this. Florida’s physical play gets the attention, but they were a good team at exiting the zone with possession this year & part of that is the forwards. The defenseman’s role can be reduced to just taking a hit or getting the puck if he has the trust that the forwards can make the connecting play & finding a complementary style like this is part of the roster building puzzle. Barkov, Lundell, Verhaeghe, Bennett can all move and find crafty ways out of the zone if the defenders can’t make a pass & adding the zone exit/entry wizard that is Brad Marchand was also a perfect fit. Vegas adding Jack Eichel as the centerpiece to go with their already strong forward corps was another example.

With all that in mind, let’s address the elephant in the room that is the K’Andre Miller trade & ensuing 8 year/$60 mil. contract. The Hurricanes had two top-four spots to fill, an almost infinite amount of cap space and have been heavily value-focused on their blue line the past 24 months, so they had room to take a swing at a player they liked and they targeted Miller. As it stands now, they had one of the smaller blue lines in the league (depending on if Nikishin makes the team) and Miller fits both the role & player type everyone says they’re lacking. He’s very tall, has a long reach, skates incredibly well and logged some tough, heavy minutes on that Rangers blue line for most of his short career. He’s also 25, so they’re anticipating him staying where he’s at now or getting better.

Carolina is considered a team that has a forest growing where they can plug most guys in & they’ll fit in or play better than they did on thier old clubs. The one everyone’s pointing to as the natural comparison to Miller is Brady Skjei, a broken player when the Hurricanes acquired him who became a reliable and productive second-pair defenseman who they could play as the de-facto first pair if that’s what the matchup called for. I wasn’t confident in Skjei fitting in with Carolina when they got him and he didn’t have the same track record as Miller, so expectations are a little higher. Skjei they were looking to mold into a top-four while they’re probably looking at Miller as a top-pair guy or a shutdown guy at the very least.

I’ve gone back-and-forth on if this is the Hurricanes throwing money at a roster hole with a player type they hope can fit or not. I wasn’t against them adding a defenseman because I think stronger forwards will make the blue line’s life easier, but with limited options and another player who fills a need available, this is a risk you should take when you have their draft capital. Their pro scouting track record also has me and a lot of others giving the benefit of the doubt on this move even if the price is high. Giving up Scott Morrow kind of stings since he was a guy you had NHL aspirations for, but you have to give to get.

So what are they getting with Miller?

His player card from this most recent season isn’t too pretty. Average offensive contributions with some splash plays thrown in, very suspect entry defense and some very good puck-moving out of the defensive zone that matches the Hurricanes profile of wanting to get the play moving north quickly. Digging deeper into his stats from previous seasons paints a more interesting picture, though because you can see a lot of the tools that made him a coveted player, still and what exactly Carolina is targeting.

I’m going to break this down in a series of A3Z charts showing how one could link to another, starting with entry defense, which is the major red flag of his play in recent years.

Miller’s had varying degrees of success with preventing scoring chances off zone entries when teams attack him. Last season was his worst while his best season was 2022-23 with opposing forwards going after his side of the ice instead of Jacob Trouba’s. One good year out of four isn’t the best track record but sometimes entry defense dings you for situations out of your control. You might do your job but the forward just beats you or your partner gives up more of a gap that the other team can exploit with better passing & more support. In the case of Miller, he has gradually changed the way he defends his blue line compared to his first couple of seasons.

Early in his career, Miller was an aggressive defender. Using that long reach & strides to disrupt entries right at the blue line before they happened. There was a risk/reward factor to it because teams did carry the puck in against him at a high rate, but he was still one of the more aggressive defenders in the league when it came to denying entries. The next couple of years he stabilized a little and last season was a mess, despite posting strong on-ice metrics.

from Hockeyviz

The Rangers didn’t give up much from the interior slot with Miller on the ice, but the left faceoff circle & the area just south of it was a bit of a hotspot. Could indicate issues with gap control & Miller sagging to the middle to protect the house and giving shooters more room to get the shot or play the wanted from the medium-danger areas. The Hurricanes tend to chase those areas more & leave the front of the net open so it will be interesting to see how Miller adapts here. I think he brings a mix of what the team wants from their defenders & how he does might depend on if they want him playing his off-side or not. Adding him & Nikishin does create a logjam on the left, so somebody is going to have to move over. It’s not as much of an issue with how much man-to-man the Hurricanes play because someone’s usually not going to be on their strong side to retrieve pucks, but it might have an impact on how many high-danger chances they give up on the rush.

Miller also had a revolving door of partners last year after playing alongside Trouba for almost his entire career & while I’m not the biggest fan of Trouba as a player, rotating partners when you’ve been with the same one for years can be a tough adjustment. Brind’Amour is as stingy as it comes with his defense pairs, so I don’t see it being a problem but there will be some growing pains with choosing the right mix.

It also might have an impact on how comfortable he is with activating offensively. Rush chances are often born out of miscues from 200 feet away and the Hurricanes love to have their defensemen crash down the wall. This might be tougher for Miller to do confidently if he’s on his off-side, but I don’t see the team sticking him in that role if he’s never done it before, especially since Jaccob Slavin has experience playing the right side. Miller’s never been a dynamo offensively, but he is a fluid skater and the type who will activate or join the rush when the chance is there. Last year, he was more conservative. To an extreme degree.

This is where the enviorment around him probably hurt his own game the most, even if his offensive numbers were good as far as on-ice impact goes. Miller himself wasn’t carrying the puck and getting it deep more times than not. The Hurricanes have a reputation as a team that wants to play that way, but it changed quite dramatically last year as the roster shifted to more players who are comfortable in that style. The defense didn’t have the same green light as the forwards did, but Miller at his peak is somewhere around where Dmitry Olrov & Sean Walker were on the entry chart, while last year he posted numbers similar to Slavin. So he could either fit in or be a piece that they were missing.

To sum it up, Miller’s shown bits an pieces of being a complete, all-around defenseman but never in the same year. One year he’s a strong shutdown defenseman and the next he’s more of a puck-mover with somewhat erratic defensive play. Not too different from Skjei, but his best seasons are ahead of what Skjei did when the Canes got him from New York, so more is expected out of Miller. My concern is whether or not they have the forwards to take advantage of the skillset Miller brings. If Miller is the shutdown defenseman alongside Slavin, that’s great but we saw the limitations of that when Slavin was at his best against Florida while the other pairs struggled & the forwards were mostly MIA. If he’s the Brady Skjei from 2021-24, that’s also great but are his puck-moving skills going to be best utilized behind Kotkaniemi and/or Staal?

Brind’Amour was a little higher on the forwards in this candid post-season interview (that you should listen to if you haven’t), but I’m not as convinced. The rumored Ehlers signing and potential trade targets (Tomas Hertl is my pipe dream) could change my opinion of this, though. There was always one line in the middle-six that dragged for Carolina in one way or another. Sometimes it was Kotkaniemi, who would have a big game or two and then go weeks posting a sub-45% xG while not scoring or doing anything else to make up for it. Other times it was Staal, tilting the ice better than no other against tough matchups but scoring maybe once or twice every ten games while eating up 14-15 minutes of ice time. I’m also the type of fan that want to avoid staying the course even if things aren’t bad, so this is just me being an annoying perfectionist. The bet they made on Logan Stankoven is a good one, though.

So, this is a pretty big risk for the Canes. It’s one they can afford to take, but it’s not as much of a sure thing as I’ve seen some people say. Miller’s shown the tools to be an effective all-around defenseman and if he fits, it allows them to ease Nikishin into the lineup instead of just tossing him into a top-four role with no breaks. Losing Morrow is a bummer even if they only saw him as a Shayne Gostisbehere replacement instead of a top-pair guy like they hoped. They’ve been at a position where they had the draft capital, cap space and organizational depth to take a big swing & this probably wasn’t the one people were expecting, but that’s been par for the course in the Tulsky era.

Something I go back to with the Canes even when Waddell was the GM was it was hard to for me to get too upset about their process because I can usually see what they’re trying to do and if it doesn’t work there are ways to get out of it or for them to salvage something while not screwing themselves for the future. Tulsky’s followed that method and sometimes it’s frustrating because you want to be mad that things didn’t work out and why they didn’t do x, y & z to get over the hump, but sometimes it feels like you’re just creating hot takes for the sake of it because you’ve got nothing else to say. That’s how it always seem to me at least, but the Miller trade is going to be a real test of how strong Carolina’s system is.