Boston Bruins President Cam Neely said Monday, Nov. 7, 2022, the team “dropped the ball" with its internal vetting of Mitchell Miller, ultimately leading to the decision to rescind its contract offer to the defenseman.Steven Senne/The Associated Press
Last week, the Boston Bruins tried to sneak a body past online security.
Very little fanfare attended the signing of Mitchell Miller, a former middling prospect rendered untouchable by a conviction for viciously abusing a disabled classmate.
Miller was drafted by Arizona. The Coyotes tossed him like a hot rock once his legal problems went viral. His U.S. college team dumped him a day later. Miller, 20, has been tooling around in hockey’s minor leagues since then.
It’s been two years since Miller’s story hit the headlines. Apparently, the Bruins organization is a believer in the healing power of the 24-hour news cycle. Evidently, it was wrong.
Most people found out the Bruins had quietly signed Miller when Commissioner Gary Bettman announced that no one had asked his permission. Bettman’s position: the Bruins can sign anybody they’d like, but the league doesn’t have to let him play.
After two days of ragged retreat – including being publicly ripped by their own players – the Bruins surrendered. For the second time, an NHL team unsigned Miller.
Boston president Cam Neely was sent out to apologize. He looked and sounded like someone who’d just spent his weekend getting the bollocking of a lifetime.
“I do believe in second chances, but maybe some don’t deserve it,” Neely said. “And I’m not saying that in particular in this situation, but I do believe in second chances.”
If that sort of mental acuity typifies conversation amongst the Bruins’ leadership, colour me shocked that any of this happened.
Plainly, a lot of things went wrong here, but the root of it is an inability to keep up. Teams no longer have a good handle on the special rules that apply to people who are good at sports. They can get away with most things. The things they can’t get away with are always changing.
In the late nineties, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was functionally run out of the NBA for refusing to stand for the U.S. national anthem. Twenty-odd years later, an NBA player could put himself in a very hard spot for refusing to kneel during the anthem. Guiding principles aren’t an immutable set of instructions. They shift over time.
The bright red line these days is bullying, often with an element of racial or sexual abuse. You can now drunkenly beat up a stranger in a bar, but you cannot berate an employee. Words are as injurious as fists, especially if you’re aiming them at someone vulnerable. That’s what the customers of professional sports agree on right now.
Unsurprisingly, the people who run sports teams are neither the most sensitive, nor the most intellectually supple. It takes them forever to realize something is a problem.
By the time they do, society is often moving on to the next problem. While teams are trying to figure out how not to make old mistakes, they’re busy making new ones.
This general confusion has resulted in the most important sports innovation in a generation – the apology.
The tough nuts of sports were raised knowing never to apologize. Now they can’t stop saying how sorry they are. It’s not just the only way to protect yourself. It’s also the one that’s guaranteed to work.
In America, apologies fix everything. You don’t have to mean it. You just have to sound sincere. Talk a lot about how it’s all your fault. Emote.
Can you imagine Cam Neely the player apologizing for anything? Now Cam Neely the executive says things like, “I’m extremely upset that we have made a lot of people unhappy with our decision.” Okay, so it’s not technically an apology. But it sounds like one. When you’re on TV, that’s the important part.
Viewed from that perspective, the Miller signing wasn’t a mistake. It was a wager.
The Bruins wanted to pick up a high-end, low-character hockey player for next to nothing. All it was going to cost them was some blowback. How much blowback? They weren’t sure. But the organization was willing to take a chance.
Best case for the hockey team? Everyone’s moved on. Worst case? What we just saw.
There was blowback. An avalanche of it, led by a commissioner sensing the opportunity to score a few morality points for himself.
For two days, the Bruins were in a state of chaotic disequilibrium. Everyone wanted blood. But now they’ve apologized. So it’ll be okay.
If it isn’t okay, they can apologize again. In an extreme case, some executive who would have lost their job eventually loses it a little early instead. That’s a risk in the modern game.
The important thing is that the team goes unscathed. The Boston Bruins can sign a dozen absolute creeps, but as long as they keep apologizing, the fans will keep watching.
The Bruins will still want to figure out what happened. Not so that these situations can be avoided in the future, but so that the process can be improved. Where did they go wrong?
It wasn’t in signing Miller. None of what Miller did is a secret. If the Bruins thought the idea of a teenaged Miller making life hell for some poor, defenceless kid was beyond the pale, they wouldn’t have signed him. But they did. So they were okay with that part.
The mistake was signing an insufficiently apologetic Miller. When you peel back all the hand-wringing, that’s what happened here – everybody failed to make sure the key player in the drama had apologized enough to be forgiven. Whether he deserves to be forgiven is not for me to say. I’m not the person he did it to.
This isn’t about doing the right thing, and never will be. It’s about understanding the rules of the game. How do you make a morally dubious decision palatable? If the player’s talent is great enough, teams will always take reputational risks to acquire it.
The Bruins didn’t get away with this one, so they apologized. By apologizing, they get away with it.