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Mike Milbury speaks out for first time since getting fired: 'I refuse to be canceled'

Published July 23, 2021 at 2:42 PM
BY TJ TUCKER
For the first time since getting fired from his position as an on-air analyst with the NHL on NBC, former NHL player and coach Mike Milbury is speaking out. Milbury was sent home from the bubble during the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs after talking about the closed off environment and making a comment that NBC called "insensitive and insulting".

"Not even any women here to disrupt your concentration," Milbury replied when discussing how the bubble might impact players with co-host Brian Boucher.

NBC agreed to pay Milbury for this year despite him not being on-air. It was the last year of his contract. The cheques have stopped coming in and Milbury decided to finally have his say in an interview with The Boston Globe.

"I want to explain the comment from that day," he said. "As a player and coach in the league, I've been on a lot of road trips and around a lot of guys that are young, fit, well-compensated, have celebrity status, and when they go on the road they play hard and they party hard. And a lot of their attention is on women, and I certainly don't mean that in a bad way."

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"Now I get it, everybody else has other ways to party, but that's my experience and I stand by it. It's biology, for (goodness) sake. So sometimes their lust for companionship was a distraction. So I didn't think there was anything wrong with the comment, but apparently, it was to other people. And I got dismissed from my job."

"Excuse me, but I am not going to be canceled. I refuse to be canceled. The only thing that's going to cancel me is the grim reaper, and I can see him in the distance, but not yet," Milbury continued.

Milbury, known for his outspoken attitude, said he's had lots of time to think since the day he was fired, and continued on regarding his problems with present-day society.

"There are many social inequities in the United States, and I am glad they are being addressed," he said. "Great things. I think we can all agree with that. But it's become a tsunami of social change, and tsunamis are indiscriminate. They'll wipe out the good and the bad and anything in its way, and I just don't think that's right."

"It makes heroes out of people that aren't heroes, and villains out of people that aren't villains. Maybe worst of all, a social tsunami is too quick to point a finger and too quick to declare guilt by legacy, and I'm not going to accept that. Just because bad things happened in the past doesn't mean I've got to be guilty for things that happen today. I don't buy that."

"What if I had said there aren't any dogs here to distract the players? Or any wives? Or children? Do I have to describe the whole pantheon of the human race in order for it to be politically correct?"

Milbury spent 14 years with NBC as a commentator. The comment in the bubble was not the first one to get him in hot water. However, he's never been one to speak with a filter.

Source: Sportscasting.com
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