Bruins' Decision to Sign Mitchell Miller Leaves Nothing but Questions

It's hard to choose which disaster to start with when it comes to the Boston Bruins' signing of Mitchell Miller on Friday and their taking it back by Sunday.

There have been so many head-scratching discrepancies that you question the competency of the front office at best, and its morality at worst.

It doesn't even feel like justice that the Bruins announced they would cut ties with Miller in light of "new information." They already knew when they signed him that Miller had been convicted in juvenile court in 2016 of racially abusing and bullying Black classmate Isaiah Meyer-Crothers.

And Meyer-Crothers is all I can think about. Don't let the rest distract you from how severely the Bruins' "vetting process" failed a victim.

The "old boys' club" tells us repeatedly that playing in the NHL is a privilege, not a right. We're sold this vague concept, and we're told hockey is the best sport in the world because of the character of the men in the room. Through this intentional vagueness, you and I might fill in the blanks with our own definitions of character and what it means to earn a privilege.

Character doesn't begin and end when you enter the locker room. It should extend to how you conduct yourself off the ice, and Miller egregiously failed.

The Boston Globe's Matt Porter asked Bruins GM Don Sweeney after the signing what Miller had done to earn the privilege to potentially play for the Bruins.

"With us doing a lot of background work over the course of the last six months, almost a year now, and spending time in particular recently with Mitchell ... his acknowledgment of the mistakes he made when he was in eighth grade and 14 years old, and it's more about what he's going to do now—not ever losing sight of the disrespect that he showed to the young man," Sweeney said. "... We're going to put him in community programs so that he continues to educate himself and others as to what being disrespectful does for you and how you carry that with you for the rest of your life."

Words matter. According to Sweeney, Miller was a 14-year-old eighth-grader in 2016, but the classmate he bullied for years, Meyer-Crothers, who has developmental disabilities, was a "young man."

According to Sweeney, what Miller did was merely disrespectful. It was actually a pattern of verbal and physical abuse.

This included Miller's telling Meyer-Crothers his mom and dad didn't love him, calling him the N-word on a daily basis, punching him in the head repeatedly and tricking him into eating a urine-soaked lollipop, forcing him to get tested for hepatitis and STDs.

And according to Sweeney, Miller could make amends by acting as a cautionary tale to all the other promising players: This is "what being disrespectful does for you and how you carry that with you for the rest of your life."

I'm more interested in how Meyer-Crothers is carrying it with him.

"He pretended to be my friend and made me do things I didn't want to do," Meyer-Crothers told the Arizona Republic in 2020. "In junior high, I got beat up by him. ... Everyone thinks he's so cool that he gets to go to the NHL, but I don't see how someone can be cool when you pick on someone and bully someone your entire life."

Bruins president Cam Neely said Sunday that they were letting Miller go in light of "new information." But Miller's list of transgressions was already public knowledge.

It was public knowledge that, according to Joni Meyer-Crothers, Isaiah's mother, Miller has not shown genuine remorse. Miller reached out to Meyer-Crothers recently via Snapchat to apologize, saying it had "nothing to do with hockey," but his mother wasn't convinced.

Mind you, Meyer-Crothers has said she forgave her son's other bully after they offered a heartfelt apology.

On Monday, Neely said the Bruins had not reached out to Meyer-Crothers, and that this was part of the "new information" that led to the Bruins' rescinding the contract.

Why hadn't they reached out?

"That's a great question. Something I need to find out," Neely told reporters at Warrior Ice Arena.

How did the president of the team not know that? And how does he still not know the reason?

There were so many resources readily available, so much information about Miller already public that it seems like the "new information" Neely and Sweeney discovered was really continued backlash. The Arizona Coyotes rescinded their pick of Miller in 2020 after public outcry; how was this not a consideration?

Aside from the robust pressure Bruins fans and hockey fans applied since the signing was announced, we saw something arguably unprecedented in the NHL: public pushback by players on the team.

"It's not something anyone in this room stands for," Nick Foligno told reporters in Toronto on Saturday. "The culture that we've built is one of inclusion, and I think it goes against that. I understand he was 14 when he made this mistake, but it's hard for us to swallow because we take a lot of pride in here, the way we act, how we carry ourselves, what it means to be a Bruin."

Captain Patrice Bergeron said: "In a way, I was not necessarily agreeing with it. The culture we've built here goes against that behavior. ... If it's the same 14-year-old that would be walking into this locker room, he wouldn't be accepted and wanted and welcomed in this locker room."

One day after these comments and more from Bruins players, the club parted ways with Miller.

"There were a lot of factors in this decision," Neely said, "and that was one of them."

The signing of Miller is now a permanent stain on the Bruins franchise, from the utter disregard of the Meyer-Crothers family to the exposure of incompetent communication among executives.

But maybe—just maybe—that Bruins players spoke out and pressured the team to reconsider will have a lasting impact in a league begging for an updated definition of character. The universal derision of the signing forced an Original Six franchise to back down from a morally dubious decision. It's a start for those who want to change the game for the better, but we still have so much further to go.

Next up is a phone call the Bruins clearly didn't make for a reason.