Dear Linechange reader,

Welcome to this week’s edition of Linechange, the newsletter keeping you informed of anything hockey + tech + culture.

Here are the top stories this week:

• Sony is going Beyond Sports

• Actor Ryan Reynolds Wants to Buy the Sens

• Boston Bruins Sign and Cut Mitchell Miller in 48 Hours

Sony is Going Beyond Sports

Sony is looking to continue bringing fans closer to game action. The company announced the acquisition of sports tech company Beyond Sports in a press release. Beyond Sports’ portfolio features two companies responsible with turning data into digital content in a way that engages fans watching through apps or at home on television.

One of those companies is Hawk-Eye Innovations, a company that offers vision processing, video replays, an cutting-edge graphics to 23 of 25 major sports leagues and federations around the world to make the viewing experience better for you.

Pulslive creates digital platforms that reach millions of fans across the globe including the iOS and android apps for the English Premier League and the official websites for the Cricket World Cup and ATP to name a few.

Canadian Born Hollywood Star Ryan Reynolds Wants to Buy the Ottawa Senators

The Ottawa Senators hockey club is making it official. The team is up for sale according to a post on the NHL’s website. The club is currently owned by the daughters of Eugene Melnyk. The long-time owner of the club passed away in March of this year.

Perhaps the more surprising part is that Hollywood megastar Ryan Reynolds wants to buy the team. You probably know him as the star of the Deadpool comic book movies. What you don’t know is that he had trouble getting the first film in the series produced and did a lot of the legwork himself.

While he has appeared in many other successful movies, the money he earned by getting the Deadpool series off the ground will no doubt pay for a big chunk of any bid that he puts forward.

The good news for Ottawa as a community is that both the league and the team have agreed that the next owner to take over the franchise must keep the team in Ottawa for the foreseeable future.

Boston Bruins Sign and Cut Mitchell Miller in 48 Hours 

Things keep getting worse and worse for defenseman Mitchell Miller. He signed a contract with the Boston Bruins and then had it terminated within 72 hours following the public backlash surrounding his history.

Miller is the centrepiece of a well-documented bullying story involving a racial minority with an intellectual disability, Isaiah Meyer-Crothers. In spite of the incident, which occurred when Miller was just 14 years old, he was drafted by the Arizona Coyotes in 2020 and then subsequently dropped due to the public backlash (yes, again).

Now the Bruins have done the same thing and it doesn’t seem like Miller will be getting another chance to revive his career anytime soon.

In a recent podcast with Hockey Night in Canada’s Elliotte Friedman, team captain Patrice Bergeron said he was “on the fence” about the whole thing, and it’s clear that the Bruins as an organization were too.

It appears the Bruins organization is ultimately going to do the right thing. Miller isn’t going to play for the club. However, because of the fact he signed a three-year guaranteed contract, the team still has to pay him until the end of the season and then they have to buy out the remaining two years of his deal. Miller is going to make at least $500,000 off of this fiasco, and probably more from the buyout of the remaining term. That’s right, he’s still a member of the team until the end of the season.

At the same time, Meyer-Crothers released a public statement about the abuse he faced from Miller years ago, offering intimate details of what happened, including being called racial slurs, being spit on, and generally facing abuse on a regular basis at the hands of Miller and his friends. The statement is a gut wrenching read and the story is far from over.

Unfortunately for Miller, he’s now had two kicks at the can in trying to earn a job in the NHL and given the Public relations nightmare the Bruins are facing, it’s unlikely that there will ever be a “third time’s the charm moment” for Miller.

Those are the top stories for this week.

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See you again soon,

Tom Sychterz, Founder