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NHL's Boston Bruins tried to sign player who harassed special-needs Black classmate for years [1]
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Date: 2022-11-07
The story begins in 2016, when Miller and a fellow eighth-grader, Hunter McKie, rubbed a push pop along a urinal at their middle school in Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo. According to a police report obtained by The Athletic and The Arizona Republic, Miller and McKie then tricked Isaiah into putting it into his mouth and bowled over laughing when he did so. Isaiah has developmental delays due to fetal alcohol syndrome; at the time, he had the mental capacity of a 10-year-old.
Surveillance footage showed that Miller and McKie then started beating and pushing Isaiah, with Miller going as far as to slam Isaiah’s head against a brick wall. Despite this, Miller repeatedly lied about his involvement. Joni Meyer Crothers, Isaiah’s adoptive mother, told The Republic that only the prospect of that video being released led Miller to finally admit what he did. Isaiah had to be tested for hepatitis, HIV and STDs; fortunately, all the tests came back negative.
Miller was subsequently adjudicated delinquent for assault and violating the Ohio Safe Schools Act, and sentenced to 25 hours community service with special-needs kids and offer written apologies to their school and Isaiah’s family. He knew this could drag him down on draft day, and sent a letter to all of the NHL’s then-31 teams expressing regret for what he had done. At least 10 other teams were unpersuaded and took him off their draft boards. So did the Coyotes—at first, anyway. However, COVID pushed back the draft from its usual June date to October, and by then a new front office team thought a little more of Miller. They picked him in the fourth round, 111th overall.
That decision didn’t sit well with Isaiah or his family, not in the least because Miller had never personally apologized to Isaiah in the four years since his adjudication. Moreover, in response to suggestions that the bathroom incident was a one-off, Isaiah and Joni told The Republic and The Athletic that Miller had subjected Isaiah to racially-charged abuse for much of the time from second grade onward, frequently calling him “brownie” and the N-word, and telling him to “go pick cotton.” While Isaiah briefly changed elementary schools, his new elementary school fed into the same middle school that Miller attended. Isaiah continued to hang around Miller because he badly wanted to fit in; it was only after the assault in the bathroom that the scales fell off his eyes. In a scathing letter to the Coyotes, Joni Meyer-Crothers claimed that Miller was still harassing Isaiah as late as 2018, and also noted that McKie had personally apologized to her son while Miller hadn’t done so.
Two weeks after the draft, the Coyotes renounced all rights to Miller. The team claimed that while it was initially willing to use this as a “teachable moment,” they changed their minds after learning more about the impact Miller’s bullying had on Isaiah and his family. According to The New York Times, team president Xavier Gutierrez and general manager Bill Armstrong decided to unload Miller after talking with Joni Meyer-Crothers and offering what Joni called a “heartfelt” apology.
A day later, Miller lost his slot on the University of North Dakota’s powerhouse hockey team. School president Andrew Armacost announced that after deliberations with head coach Brad Berry, other school officials, and Miller’s family, he had decided to remove Miller from the team while allowing him to stay on as a student.
Miller continued to light up the country’s top junior league, the United States Hockey League, moving on to the central Nebraska-based Tri-City Storm. This apparently got the attention of the Bruins, who signed him to an entry-level contract on Friday and sent him to their top minor league affiliate, the Providence Bruins of the American Hockey League.
The news of Miller’s signing didn’t sit well in the Bruins locker room, according to The Athletic’s Fluto Shinzawa. Ahead of the Bruins’ game against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday night , team captain Patrice Bergeron told reporters that he wasn’t entirely on board with the signing, and made clear Miller would have a hard sell to make if he was ever promoted up from Providence. Bergeron added that if Miller was “the same 14-year-old” who abused Isaiah, he wouldn’t last long. Alternate captain Brad Marchand was of a similar mind, saying that if he and other team leaders didn’t think Miller met “the standard that we hold our teammates to, in this room,” he wouldn’t be a Bruin for long. Forward Nick Foligno, who had captained the Columbus Blue Jackets before being traded to Boston, said that Miller’s signing was “a tough pill to swallow” for the rest of the team, and that he and others still had “a lot of concerns.”
Nick Goss of NBC Sports Boston summed up the sentiment in the locker room by noting that Miller’s signing appeared to go against the “high standard of character” that the Bruins’ veteran players had long upheld. Bergeron, Marchand and Foligno’s pregame comments—including their criticism of Miller—were left up unedited on the Bruins’ Twitter feed.
x 🎥 #NHLBruins captain Patrice Bergeron addresses the media ahead of tonight's game against the Maple Leafs in Toronto: pic.twitter.com/Jinxb0Y9U5 — Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) November 5, 2022
x 🎥 #NHLBruins alternate captain Brad Marchand addresses the media ahead of tonight's game against the Maple Leafs in Toronto: pic.twitter.com/8M6i1zlJlU — Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) November 5, 2022
x 🎥 #NHLBruins forward Nick Foligno addresses the media ahead of tonight's game against the Maple Leafs in Toronto: pic.twitter.com/fHLOLyy1Rw — Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) November 5, 2022
By then, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman had also weighed in, saying that based on what had been reported, Miller wouldn’t be eligible to play in the NHL at present. Bettman didn’t completely close the door on Miller being allowed to play, but told reporters at the Global Series in Finland that the league office would have to clear him before he ever suited up for an NHL game.
Isaiah and his family, needless to say, were not happy about the signing. Joni told The Athletic that she, her husband Jamie, and Isaiah were “blindsided” by the news. Joni said that no one from the Bruins ever spoke to them directly before the signing was announced. She also reiterated that Miller has never made any effort to make amends for what he did to Isaiah unless he was trying to get on a team. In this case, the Bruins apparently told Miller that they would not sign him unless he apologized to Isaiah.
Joni went further in a text message exchange with Guy Flaming, host of “The Pipeline Show,” a podcast covering college, amateur and minor league hockey.
x /2
.. in June of 2022 and she was VERY clear that nothing had changed (since Phoenix drafted and then dropped him and so did North Dakota) and that there was never a personal apology, only a court ordered statement.
That was June 2022. — Guy Flaming (@TPS_Guy) November 4, 2022
x With her permission…her replies so far: pic.twitter.com/TB2uaDp1Mx — Guy Flaming (@TPS_Guy) November 4, 2022
x A small correction on her part (she replied “yes”): pic.twitter.com/4krovY4Dkm — Guy Flaming (@TPS_Guy) November 4, 2022
Apparently Miller reached out to Isaiah on Snapchat—and even then only acknowledged the bathroom incident, not the many years of abuse before then.
Flaming also shared a letter Jamie Crothers wrote to Miller earlier in the year calling him out for both his abuse and his lack of remorse.
x This letter was written by the victim's parents in regard to Mitchell Miller showing no remorse and how long the abuse went on, not an "incident" but years of abusive behaviour. pic.twitter.com/OkEK1sOSMB — Carol B (@bartley16) November 5, 2022
By Sunday night, the criticism had become too much to bear, and the Bruins unloaded him. In a terse statement, team president and former Bruins great Cam Neely said that “new information” had surfaced that led the team to conclude Miller didn’t belong in Boston. Um, Cam? There was no new information. It was all easily available with a simple Google search.
At a press conference on Monday, Neely faulted the process by which Miller was vetted, and was particularly concerned that no one had contacted Isaiah’s family.
Ultimately, this falls on Bruins general manager Don Sweeney, another former Bruins great. The vetting process is his responsibility, and I’d be surprised if he has a job by the end of the calendar year.
A lot of people online have claimed that Miller shouldn’t be punished for something he did in middle school. They miss the point, and badly. This was criminal harassment of a developmentally delayed kid that took place over several years, and apparently continued for some time after Miller was adjudicated delinquent. He has never even attempted to apologize unless he has been orderd to do so, and even then minimizes what he did, based on how he continues to focus on the incident in the bathroom. The racial undertones only make an appalling situation even more so.
We talk about second chances, but they have to be earned—and Miller hasn’t earned it. If he doesn’t understand by now what he did, he may not ever understand it. It makes one wonder why he’s even playing in junior hockey. Shouldn’t his roster slot go to someone who has the capacity to, um, be a human being?
The next step, in my mind, is for the USHL to unload Miller. If we’re to send a message that mistreating the most vulnerable among us is not to be tolerated, it has to start now.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2022/11/7/2134365/-NHL-s-Boston-Bruins-tried-to-sign-player-who-harassed-special-needs-Black-classmate-for-years
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