Rise and Fall of Mitchell Miller

Mitchell Miller was born on December 20, 2001, in Sylvania, Ohio (Suburb of Toledo.) He was a talented hockey player since the age of 12, where he played on a nationally ranked 13U team in Detroit, a full 1 hour away. He has always played defense and was great at his position, putting up almost a point a game when he was in eighth grade. When he was 18, he got to live his childhood dream of making it to the NHL, as he was selected 111th overall by the Arizona Coyotes. But just over a week later, the Coyotes would release his draft rights, no longer making him a part of the Coyotes organization. For someone who had the potential to become a solid defenseman in the NHL, why was Mitchell Miller released, and how did he suddenly become the talk of the hockey world? Well for that, we have to go back to when he was 14.

As Mitchell Miller entered his freshman year at high school, the pressure was on him. He had just come off a great season in which he put up 20 points in 21 games with the Compuware AAA team. In high school, he had to accomplish better than what he already did. However, while he was having a phenomenal season in ninth grade, he and his best friend were torturing a disabled black boy, Isaiah Meyer-Crothers. When I say torturing, you might think “Oh Mitchell and his friend just bullied the boy and he cried and called it torture.” No, I mean literal torture. Imagine coming into school every day, knowing that you would get beat up while the person that beat you up repeatedly yelled racist slurs at you, including the N-word. That is what Isaiah had to endure in junior high and in high school. As another example of Miller’s delinquent behavior, Miller bought a lollipop, rubbed it on the inside of a urinal, and forced Isaiah Meyer-Crothers to eat it. Isaiah had to be tested for hepatitis, HIV, and other diseases, but luckily all tests came back negative. That was eventually what landed him in court, where he and his best friend were sentenced to 25 hours of community service each, which is a weak punishment if I’m being honest. When the judge read his final decision, he said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Mitchell, I do not think that you are sorry. I think you are sorry that you got caught, and I think that you find this a little inconvenient for you.”

Between this court case and the time Mitchell left for the USHL, a hockey league in the midwest for people ages 16-21, he continued to bully Isaiah. However, his best friend, after the court case, deeply apologized to Isaiah, and Isaiah and the Meyer-Crothers family forgave him. However, Mitchell did not apologize for his actions, as he went to the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders of the USHL in 2018. In the 2018-2019 season, Mitchell Miller was forgotten among the news outlets. People seemed to forget everything that he did. In 2019-2020, Mitchell Miller had the best season of his life, putting up 33 points in 48 games as a defenseman, which was good enough to put him in the conversation of being a potential late first, early second-round pick, a very high ranking. However, as the 2020 NHL draft drew closer and closer, Mitchell Miller needed to go to combines for every NHL team. And this is where the real trouble begins.

At the combines, every scout in the NHL who has seen Mitchell Miller play said not to draft him because of what happened when he was 14. And during every interview that Miller attended with an NHL team, the team’s interviewer asked him about the situation. And after the interview, most teams put him on their do-not-draft list. This is why Mitchell Miller went from being probably selected in the first or second round to him falling to pick number 111, where the Arizona Coyotes drafted him. However, after he was drafted a plethora of negative comments about him were made because someone leaked the bullying incident that happened to Isaiah Meyer-Crothers. And suddenly Mitchell Miller was the center of attention not in Toldeo Ohio, but in the entire USA and Canada. People were talking about him on TV, on the radio, and in newspapers. This prompted Isaiah Meyer-Crothers’s mother, Joni, to write a very compelling letter to all NHL teams. In it, she called out the Coyotes for picking Miller and wrote about the Black-Lives-Matter initiative that every NHL team is in, saying that "Again, the bully incident that continued over years has damaged our son mentally significantly and your organization is more concerned about Mitchell and your hockey success. In my opinion, that is being part of the problem. There is a victim out there that was and still at the hands of your 111th pick." (sportingnews.com/ca/nhl/news/never-apologized-letter-coyotes-draft-pick-victims-mother-to-team/1fel8kuj8o6sk1fypu98ls4k41). This prompted a week-long investigation by the Arizona Coyotes, in which at the end of it all they renounced the draft rights of Mitchell Miller, making him a free agent. And this sounds extremely bad, but it gets even worse.

Mitchell Miller committed to the University of North Dakota (UND), a college famous for producing star NHL players. When the Coyotes renounced their draft rights, UND also investigated the situation and proclaimed that after consulting with the Miller family, and numerous people in the UND athletic and administrative departments, they have banned Miller from playing hockey for UND.

This is the story of someone who had the potential to be a star in the NHL. But because of his continued delinquent behavior that he has yet to apologize to the victim for, he will never be a star, nor will he be looked at the same ever again.