Mitchell Miller’s agent, Eustace King, is telling his side of the story after the Bruins cut ties with his client just two days after signing him.
In an interview with Andy Strickland on “The Cam & Strick Podcast” that lasted an hour, King explained why he decided to take Miller on as a client, what he understood to have happened between Miller and Isaiah Meyer-Crothers, what happened during their conversations with the Bruins, and his reaction to Boston cutting ties.
In a statement issued Sunday night, Bruins president Cam Neely cited “new information” in announcing the team’s decision to move on from Miller. Asked on Monday what that “new information” was, Neely said, “The fact that we didn’t talk to the [Meyer-Crothers] family was concerning.”
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King said that he is not aware of any new information that has surfaced that hadn’t been covered during a multi-hour meeting that he, Miller and Miller’s mother had with the Bruins’ “senior management team.”
“I think they have some new information that they feel, but to the best of my knowledge, no new information has come out,” King said.
The Bruins have not officially terminated Miller’s contract yet, and it remains unclear how they will do so. There could be a mutual agreement between the two parties, the Bruins could claim that Miller violated his contract, or they could wait until the offseason and buy it out. Neely said on Monday that he could not get into details about financial specifics.
King said he does not think there were any contract violations.
“There are moral and ethical clauses that can be in contracts, and you can see where someone could eventually trigger the termination of a contract. In this case, there was nothing that happened post-signing the contract,” he said. “And that’s usually when you’d see some sort of termination. Again, I’d have to spend more time on this, but specifically in this case, everyone knew what was at stake. Everyone knew the risk they were taking. Everyone knew everything. Nothing has come up or been surfaced that is different from everything you’ve seen before.”
Neely was also asked if he felt misled by Miller or King, but declined to answer. In a statement issued by King on Sunday, some of the work he cited that Miller was doing included court-ordered community work as well as a commitment to work with The Carnegie Initiative, which The Carnegie Initiative later said in its own statement was merely a conversation between the two sides and not actually any sort of agreement to work together.
King claimed he did not mislead anyone and said Miller’s community work did go beyond court-ordered service.
“A lot of people have said you can’t credit community service or what you were told by the magistrate to do as quality time. But when Mitchell was playing in the USHL, after his community service, he was doing things,” King said. “He was routinely working and going to local elementary schools. He was discussing anti-bullying. He was feeding the homeless and elderly.
“…He did all these things while he was there, and then he went to his next team in Tri-City and he frequently went to schools again. He worked with the Little Miracles and did things like that. And he began that process, and this was not mandated. This was stuff that was done on his own accord and with the supervision of the team.”
King said he shared all the information that he had with the Bruins during their meeting.
“I flew into Boston. I sat with all their senior management team. I had Mitchell and his mom, and we began the process of explaining ourselves and also discussing the timeline. We were very transparent, very open,” he said. “We didn’t hold anything back. We made sure that everyone had the time. And when I say these conversations, these conversations aren’t 30 minutes. These conversations are anywhere from three-to-five hours long.”
King said Neely and general manager Don Sweeney were both in that meeting and that “ownership” also stopped by, although he didn’t specify if that meant Charlie or Jeremy Jacobs or both. Neely said on Monday that the Jacobs were made aware of the plan to sign Miller, but gave no indication that either had talked to Miller.
“They [Neely and Sweeney] were there. Ownership passed by and had a conversation and spent some time and asked their own questions,” King said. “We also had community service folks. We also had a psychologist. We wanted to make sure that whoever signed him, we had a plan in place and that we are actually going to do something and make sure that if we were going to do it, that everyone was all in and everyone knew what they were getting into. The one thing I didn’t want to do was mislead anybody.”
King also pushed back against the claim made by Joni Meyer-Crothers (the mother of Miller’s bullying victim, Isaiah) that Miller never apologized until last week, and that even that apology was just a single social media message.
According to King, Miller and Isaiah Meyer-Crothers had been talking for a month before he signed with the Bruins and were “making progress.”
“Before signing with the Bruins, Mitchell and Isaiah had been in communication, and they’ve been in communication for probably the last 30 days or so,” King said. “It was via social media, it was via text messaging, and ultimately it became via a phone call. During that time, what I was finding was that Mitchell and Isaiah were going through their own healing process.
“…Isaiah and Mitchell, as I’d like to categorize the conversation, were making progress. Mitchell, in his messages to him, was apologizing and said he was a bad friend, he shouldn’t have done what he’d done. He really apologized and said he would like to get together and sit, face with him, and have an apology. And Isaiah kept saying, ‘I would like to have that happen, but unfortunately I’m living in Detroit, so you would have to come to Detroit.’”
King said Miller and Meyer-Crothers had been unable to coordinate an in-person meeting prior to Miller signing with the Bruins, but that it was his understanding that Meyer-Crothers was “accepting” of Miller’s apology.
Meyer-Crothers has not spoken on the record himself since Miller’s signing and by all accounts does not want the media attention. The Hockey Diversity Alliance released a statement on Tuesday saying that Meyer-Crothers had contacted them Tuesday morning and “expressed his distress to us.” They also said that they “quickly and emphatically declined” a request from King to grant their approval to Miller’s signing.
UPDATE: Meyer-Crothers released a statement of his own on Wednesday and contradicted much of what King said about his relationship with Mitchell.
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