Golden Knights Re-Up Miller

The Vegas Golden Knights dipped into their salary cap savings in negotiating with restricted free agent defenseman Colin Miller and they came up with a 4-year contract extension, reportedly worth $15.5 million in total, a $3.875 million cap hit per year.

Miller was the team's leading scoring defenseman in their inaugural season, picking up 10 goals and 41 points in all 82 games for the club, ranking him 28th among all defensemen in scoring.  He was one of the few defensemen that found his way into the rotation of defenders throughout the regular season, managing to play in every regular season game.

The 25-year old also had a strong playoff campaign, picking up 7 points in all 20 games of the run to the Finals, which certainly helped to ramp up his value in his discussions.

The deal looks to be quite the positive, given his rankings, as he could have been making a little bit more, while giving up a couple of years of unrestricted free agency, so it was a strong case by Vegas that kept his cap number down moving forward.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Paul Stastny	6.500	Colin Miller	3.875	Marc-Andre Fleury	5.750
Tomas Tatar	5.300	Brayden McNabb	2.500	Malcolm Subban	0.650
David Clarkson	5.250	Nate Schmidt	2.225
Jonathan Marchessault	5.000	Nick Holden	2.200
Reilly Smith	5.000	Deryk Engelland	1.500
Cody Eakin	3.850	Jon Merrill	1.375
Ryan Reaves	2.775	Brad Hunt	0.650
Erik Haula	2.750
Oscar Lindberg	1.700
Pierre-Edouard Bellemare	1.450
Alex Tuch	0.925
Cody Glass	0.894
Tomas Hyka	0.650
Ryan Carpenter	0.650
Brandon Pirri	0.650

The Golden Knights have been busy tooling their already potent lineup for another run at things next season, despite losing a couple of key veterans to unrestricted free agency.  With the Miller deal now done, they can now concentrate on William Karlsson and Shea Theodore, the two pool worthy RFAs left on their list of things to do and they still have about $15.4 million in cap space with the 24 players listed above, not to mention the potential to put David Clarkson's cap hit on LTIR relief, if needed.  Things are still looking up in Vegas.