Follow UsDavid Miller did not have the best of the Indian Premier League (IPL) seasons in 2025. He, in fact, had a season to forget, scoring only 153 runs in 11 innings of 11 games that he featured in. More worrisome was the Proteas man’s strike rate of 127, the lowest since his 2021 season with Rajasthan Royals (RR).
He has set things up nicely for the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG), his team, to release him for the next IPL season without regret. So if Miller is indeed released, here are the top three teams that will most likely go for the IPL veteran.
The Mumbai Indians (MI) lacked a finisher who could kill the game at the end alongside Hardik Pandya. Though Naman Dhir did more than a good enough job, the bowlers never really feared him as someone who could steal the game away from them.
A veteran of 141 IPL matches with more than 3,000 runs in his kitty, Miller could be that experienced player who can complement Pandya as a finisher after the likes of Rohit Sharma, Suryakumar Yadav, Ryan Rickelton, and Tilak Varma would have done the damage at the top.
Will Jacks is MI’s go-to overseas player, but he is a top-order batter, and hence an overseas finisher is much-needed, especially after they let go of Tim David, who was supposed to be the long-term replacement for the legendary Kieron Pollard.
Since Miller has already played for the Rajasthan Royals (RR) before, it makes perfect sense for the franchise to go after him in either a trade or the IPL 2026 mini auction. Since the Royals are facing the finisher's problem with both Shimron Hetmyer and Dhruv Jurel not performing to expectations when needed the most, they might as well try someone who has been there and done that.
Miller strikes at 175 in the death overs i.e. 16-20, and will be much-needed by the RR unit. After Jos Buttler’s departure and the rumour of Sanju Samson going to the Chennai Super Kings (CSK), RR also need experience in the middle, which Miller can provide.
If any team needs a player with a strike rate of 175 and an average of 36.3 overs 16-20, it is CSK. They did not do well in that phase during IPL 2025, scoring only 678 runs at an average of 22 and a strike rate of 167.
The average in the death overs was the worst for CSK, clearly suggesting that the batters might have tried to score big, but they were not able to last long, and hence the score that the team would have liked to achieve could not do so.
Miller could turn out to be the antidote to that problem with his experience of 530 T20s, where he has hit 11,343 runs with four centuries.