Blues Acquire Ryan Miller, Steve Ott From Buffalo Sabres for Jaroslav Halak, Chris Stewart

The speculation's been going on for weeks, the goaltender stats analysis has been ongoing here at Game Time - do the Blues need Ryan Miller when they have the 3rd best GAA in the league? Is there that little confidence in the tandem of Jaroslav Halak and Brian Elliott?

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Apparently Doug Armstrong believes the answer to that is "yes." In a not unsurprising deal, the Blues have acquired Ryan Miller in part of a three-way deal that sends Halak to the Buffalo Sabres in exchange for Ryan Miller. It's a UFA exchange - one excellent goalie for one slightly inconsistent but still pretty good one.

Basically, this is Lars Eller for Ryan Miller. Not bad.

Do the Blues need Miller? He is an obvious upgrade. In a season behind an atrocious Buffalo team, Miller has put up all-star stats. He has a .923 save percentage even though he has a 2.72 GAA. Halak has a .917 save percentage and a 2.23 GAA. But Halak has been labeled as inconstant despite having generally a pretty good season - in comparison to Miller's save percentage on an admittedly God-awful team one can see where Army's going with this.

If you're trying to fix a playoff problem, I'm not sure that's been done, but if you want to solidify a trip to the playoffs and a deep run, this isn't absolutely terrible. Necessary? Time will tell, but the Blues are now the proud owners of one former American hero.

An issue that they do need help with is a center. And to the rescue comes... Steve Ott. Great. As Childhood Trauma mentioned yesterday in the post regarding Ott, we already have eight of him. You want meh scoring players with grit? You've come to the right place! You want a legitimate playmaking center? Well, um... move along. Nothing to see here.

Chris Stewart has stalled. He has played a terrible game for well over half of this season, and is an absolute entityon the ice. I am not crushed by his departure, and I assume none of you are either.

But Steve Ott. That's the best they could wrangle out of Buffalo?

Also going to the Sabres are prospect Will Carrier, the 2015 first round pick, and a 2016 third round pick.

Army's in win now mode. Not sure if Ott'll help, but Miller can't hurt.