Just two days after the Boston Bruins signed Sylvania native Mitchell Miller, they caved under a deluge of public pressure late Sunday and cut ties with the controversial young defenseman.
They also sent a clarion message.
If you’re a pro sports star and you behave horrifyingly as an adult, you can come back from anything.
If you’re not and you behave horrifyingly in middle school, you must pay the price forever.
I don’t mean to sound flippant.
I’m just torn on the right path forward here.
As cruel and contemptible as Mitchell’s actions were in a six-year-old bullying case, he was 14 at the time and has already paid a steep price, both as a juvenile and in 2020, when his past stormed into the national news after the Arizona Coyotes selected him in the fourth round of the NHL draft. (The Coyotes swiftly renounced his rights.)
Should the punishment include a life hockey sentence, too?
Only if hypocrisy rules.
Understand, that’s not to minimize Miller’s conduct, and our first thoughts should always be with the victim, Isaiah Meyer-Crothers.
If anything is unfair here, it’s not Miller, now 20, being shunned by the hockey community. It was the alleged abuse Meyer-Crothers endured at McCord Junior High School.
In 2016, Miller and another youth were charged with assault and violating the Ohio Safe Schools Act after they admitted to making Meyer-Crothers — a Black classmate with developmental disabilities — eat a candy push pop they had wiped in a bathroom urinal. Surveillance footage also showed the boys punching and kicking Meyer-Crothers.
The Meyer-Crothers family said the incident continued a pattern of bullying by Miller, whom they alleged also regularly used racial slurs — including the N-word — against Isaiah.
This wasn’t boys being boys, the kind of transgression that can be written off entirely to immaturity.
Miller owed Meyer-Crothers an unequivocal apology long ago. (Miller has expressed regret for his actions several times, and, in a statement Friday, he said: “Since the incident, I have come to better understand the far-reaching consequences of my actions that I failed to recognize and understand nearly seven years ago.” But Meyer-Crothers’ mother, Joni, questions whether Miller is truly remorseful, saying the first time he apologized directly to her son was in a social media message last month.)
“Mitchell needs to understand the magnitude of what he did,” Joni said Monday. “You can’t treat people that way.”
But ...
While Miller deserved to have the book thrown at him, that doesn’t mean his story is finished.
I can’t believe that needs to be said, but it does.
There was a troubling tone to the extreme reactions after the Bruins signed Mitchell to an entry-level contract, with many fans — and pundits — suggesting he should be banished from pro hockey forever.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, too, told reporters: “I can’t tell you that he’ll ever be eligible.”
As we’ve noted before, that outlook takes an incredibly bleak view on the human capacity to reflect, mature, and grow, and it screams double standard.
True, no one has a right to play big-time hockey. Miller is free to earn a living doing something else.
“There is a lesson to be learned here for other young people,” Bruins general manager Cam Neely said. “Be mindful of careless behaviors ... The repercussions can be felt for a lifetime.”
It’s also fair to note that standard is applied more unevenly in pro sports than the splatter on a Pollock painting.
And I wonder: How is it that Miller is unemployable for his actions at 14 in the same world that so rewards, say, Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson or Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill? (You might recall that Hill pleaded guilty to domestic assault and battery by strangulation after allegedly choking and punching his then-pregnant girlfriend in the face and stomach. He was 20 at the time. He’s now the highest-paid wideout in the NFL.)
In hockey, consider John Vanbiesbrouck, the former NHL goalie who in 2003 resigned as the coach and GM of a junior hockey team after calling a Black player the N-word, “more than once,” he acknowledged. He was 39 at the time. He’s now a top executive at USA Hockey, serving as GM of the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team.
What Miller did was terrible, but no one should be permanently defined by their worst moments as a young teen.
Last year, former Bowling Green State University athletic director Bob Moosbrugger called to tell me the Falcons’ hockey program was exploring the possibility of signing Miller. He asked what I thought of the possibility.
I told him I believed in second chances, as long as the school felt Miller was remorseful. (Miller ended up playing junior hockey last season.)
I believe the same today.
Let us have compassion for Meyer-Crothers and keep the door open for Miller.
If an NHL team truly believes Miller the man deserves an opportunity, it should give him one, then have the conviction to stand behind him.
First Published November 7, 2022, 10:18 p.m.
