Where's Bruce?

C'mon, give the guy a break! He looked at Google Maps 3 years ago and couldn't find a piece of land big enough. What more do you want, ya bloody ingrate?

 

Taken as straight-up, yeah, it's a nice courtesy.

But, imagine you've been with this guy all these years and are used to him giving you crap, wouldn't you think he's playing with you (like an old guy telling his kids they're out of the will)?

Besides, once you give them that notice, their loyalties and motivation immediately no longer align with the organization. That's why sometimes when you give 2-weeks notice, the company will say 'we'll pay you for two weeks, but end of day is good enough'.

 

I think that all depends.

I've definitely been on both sides of the situation, 1 where I was basically told dont come back after id given my notice, and 1 where I was in what amounts to a lame duck position.

In both communication with your boss matters, and in both your conduct yourself as professionally as possible because you have projects to finish (that you get to take credit for later) and because you your conduct directly reflects in what kind of recommendation you'll get down the line.

Not being re-upped isn't the same as being told "you suck at your job" (usually you just get fired for that). It often means that a project requires a skillset outside your expertise, or that your scope within the project is satisfactorily finished. No bad blood. No questions about "loyalty". Heck the loyalty is that you get to finish your contract while you search for your next thing instead of being shown the door

 

I hope we're just having fun here... it is fun (to me) to tease out the possibilities but events are moving rapidly beyond this scenario?

I agree that perception is key but coloration is one of the responsibilities of each side's lawyers. MLS/Kraft should be able to hire more and better lawyers. And his contract description is one of many possible tools that could be used to perform coloration. At this point, if they still fear an attempt at a lawsuit, I don't know why the REVs don't consider admitting that there was a player/assistant coach rebellion. It would help color in the argument that they had little choice but to put him on a shelf until his contract expired, IMHO. I'd almost wager the REVs wanted it to pan out this way in order to get rid of Ritchie while also strengthening their argument (see item 7 below). But BB isn't that smart and their denial of the rebellion suggests it wasn't their strategy.

I strongly agree that this is a situation where both sides should be gaming out probabilities and risks. I don't agree that the lawyers should be the only ones, in business, gaming that out. Further I strongly disagree that they should be sole deciders of the course selected. I think that you are correct in saying that lawyers skew toward attempting to eliminate ALL risk. That is why someone ELSE, non-lawyer in my experience, needs to have a >50% vote in how to proceed. Hopefully, again in a business, that is someone that has an experience informed sense that you almost never totally eliminate RISK; you have to manage it and retire it over time as part of the real goal: maximizing shareholder value (public) or owner(s) value (private). Further that person needs to understand that, until the jury goes to deliberation, risk profiles can swing, sometimes dramatically. In short time plays a part in the strategy. I think that, rightly or wrongly, RW is currently at an extreme disadvantage.

MLS/Krafts have been gauging Risk all along. I think that if BA had literally broken the law and MLS' investigation found that, they would have fired him as soon possible to protect their own image. Until BA resigned they don't seem to have discovered anything that they felt was so damning, in the sense frankly of making MLS look bad, that they needed to summarily let BA go. I think it suggests some bounds on how egregious BA's transgression was (at least that they found). So, legally, we are basically talking about Ritchie suing the MLS/Krafts? Except, if we are talking probabilities, I think the probability that it ever goes to court is exceedingly low. Ritchie wants taken care of and the MLS/Krafts want him to go away. So a negotiation will commence.

I think that MLS/Krafts will, during said negotiations point out some things like this:

1. We took your allegation seriously.
2. We hired a law firm to investigate.
3. We put the accused on suspension to protect you from a hostile work environment.
4. We made you interim head coach
5. The accused resigned, he is no longer an employee. We found no crime (felony/misdemeanor) there wasn't much we could do to him after he quit.
6. We endorsed (through failure to correct/deny) that you were interim through the end of the year.
7. The players and coaches mutinied. They made it clear they could not coach with/under you nor play for you. This put us in a position to need to find a new head coach.
8. Here is the list of coaching changes over the last 20 years in the top 10 leagues in the world. There were [making it up] 5000 changes. In only 3 cases did a new head coach come in and keep the entire set of assistants. In less than 100 cases did the new coach come in and keep any of the prior assistants.
9. There is no job here where you can be useful that is not a demotion.
10. We continue and will continue to pay your salary and provide your benefits through the end of your contract. Oh, BTW, we have the internal memos documenting that you were told as early as (June? May? earlier?) that you weren't being brought back next year and that you and your agent should seek other positions.

IDK, they might leave some out to save them for later. 8 for instance. But at any rate, the first round of coloration during the negotiations seems to favor MLS. BB already started to degrade item 6 though at the press conference.

I currently have goose eggs for what RW is going to counter with. Based on the above reasoning, I'm wagering he isn't going to be able to prove an overly egregious transgression on Bruce's part and I'm all in on wagering he has a huge mountain to climb to pin much fault on MLS/Krafts. I guess over to you. Maybe you have something? I not really sure that a judge would find enough cause to let this go to trial. If he doesn't have an ace up his sleeve he is going to settle for a relatively small dollar value deal.

 

We know so little that it's hard to game all this out. What I've been speculating on has been based solely on a whistleblower model, and that could go out the window if there's some other legal regime at play with a different set of rules. So who knows?

As far as what Richie's got, the problem for lawyers and businesses is mostly that if he's got anything, that's more legal risk than they want. It's absolutely the case that most civil lawsuits (again, assuming that's what we're talking about) get settled, so whatever Richie's got would likely end in a payout, not damages. But bargaining positions will depend at least in part on what harm Richie suffered at Bruce's hands (assuming he did; MLS would presumably be liable for that) and how much MLS did to protect Richie as an employee both before and after they were made aware of Bruce's transgression. I think that's where MLS/the Revs are probably in trouble - it doesn't look like they've handled that well, since the cone of silence seems to have made Richie look like the bad guy, which we don't know is fair (and could be considered retaliatory under whistleblower-type considerations).

That all probably does increase the likelihood of a settlement/deal between Richie and the Revs/league. But I think it also means that Richie is in a pretty strong position, because he seems to have largely been a victim of the way the investigation has played out, whether or not he was a victim of Bruce's malfeasance (and whether or not he was a lousy manager). That's why I suspect the Revs FO is walking on eggshells around him - it's not in their interest to aggravate him any more by appearing to demote him or push him. He may yet leave, for sure. But I bet he'll end up doing pretty well from it if he does.

But again, there are so many unknowns, who knows?

 

Isn't it basically standard operating procedure to hold a press conference at some point when there's a coaching change?

They're not going to hand out information if it's not in the club's best interests.

I honestly don't know what people were expecting them to say today.

Again, I'm not terribly impressed with how things have been handled since Saturday. I wouldn't have issued the press release five minutes after conceding the game-tying goal against Minnesota. Were I in charge, I would have told the team on Monday morning, issued a press release around noon, and held a Zoom call later in the afternoon.

I just think it's unrealistic to think that the team wasn't going to feed reporters a bunch of crap and dance around the hard questions. They're trying to do PR when they've basically been told to keep their mouths shut.

 

Tara Sullivan in the Globe "
The Revolution would rather ignore what they call the ‘noise’ and ‘baloney,’ but it’s not that easy"

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09...eks-its-not-that-easy/?p1=HP_Feed_AuthorQuery

 

This is what Bilello said yesterday:

"But when you’re in these very complex matters, when you’re dealing with very formal investigations, there’s times where you can’t say things and there’s times where you can’t share things that maybe you wish you could share with your players, with your fan base, with everyone."

How is that not effectively the same thing?

 

As one of those supporters mentioned in the comments to the Blazing Musket story, who feels that SJ is a "beloved and legendary figure," I find that I am asking myself: "So ownership/Bilello are going with Onalfo and have not shown Richie the door yet. And, from what I've read in the Athletic and elsewhere, it seems like a concern of that group is going to be, 'Are SJ and DVB going to be acting the role of 'player's coaches' and in practice, the locker room, or other situations implicitly or explicitly going to be trash talking Onalfo and Richie and the rest of the "let's move on" crowd to the players? Probably not out of the realm of possibility. So we have to get them out of the locker room and off the field.' Now, as a supporter, if Onalfo or Bilello stood up at the presser and said, well we fired them because they would be a cancer in the locker room, how would I feel about that? Would I be, "Damn straight they would be trash talking, because you all deserve it. I admire them for it." or would I be "Ouch, SJ and DVB are professionals, but still at least a chance of that happening, but did you really have to say that in public?"" So, even if maybe I don't agree with it, I think I can understand why CO and BB would be evasive on that topic...

 

I have no confidence there are good ethical reasons behind it. I have every confidence that the use of the law to obscure events as much as possible [be it a directive from MLS or one from the Revs] is a good possibility.

 

This whole event bears the awful stink of political shit washing through, and rotting away, a world of sport which should be a refuge from the awful stink of political shit.
A person in a personal quarrel using the weapons offered by a degraded society to try to destroy the other.

 

Maybe they didn't want to bad mouth a club legend on his way out the door for reacting poorly to a crappy situation?

And how do you know which questions have legal ramifications without knowing more information about what happened?

 

"Maybe they didn't want to bad mouth a club legend on his way out the door for reacting poorly to a crappy situation?"

Heh. Mike Marshall said in one sentence what took me a whole dense paragraph to say. Thanks!

(But I agree with Monty that they shouldn't have had a useless presser if they knew they weren't going to tell us anything of substance.)

 

Yes, of course - but that's true with every organization.

But, they go to the insulting/lazy/incompetent extreme of not saying anything. That is what's so maddening - that they think the public doesn't deserve anything.

I asked Arena at a Q&A about disclosing player availability information, like other teams/leagues do - and he said that it gave opponents an advantage to have that information and as long as the rules didn't require it, he wasn't going to do it.

1. I felt respected in that he took my question seriously and gave an honest answer
2. there was a rationale in not disclosing that information - it wasn't about not ever saying anything you aren't absolutely required to

The 'baloney' thing was a little weird - it was like Onalfo shifted into what his message to the team was, but was directing it to the public.

Yes, the team needs to put it aside and not get caught up in the 'baloney'; OTOH the public needs/deserves some explanations.

He used that as a shield to not comment about anything. That's disingenuous, at the very least.

He can explain why the assistants were let go. He can explain why RW was chosen as interim coach. He can explain how/why this went from a Revolution issue to an MLS issue. He can explain who is actually making these decisions. He can say whether the Krafts have been involved in conversations with team management (they danced around that as well).

How about saying there were disagreements with the coaching strategy, philosophy, plans to move forward, ..., pick your choice. Something like that is probably actually the truth.

Agree - but I think she could have hit back even harder.

I'm hoping that Shaughnessy does.

 

I find it funny to see how quickly posts return to yester-year now the BB is front and center.

First there are posts about how unsatisfying the press conference was and how much BB was deceptive, evasive, not forthcoming etc.

Then there are posts that try to dream up some excuse for "why" he, effectively, said NOTHING AT ALL. These comments aren't specific to BA/RW-gate. They cover the entire time that BB has been around.

BB is bad news. He is part of the problem, not the solution. Please don't make excuses for him.

 

I saw that news and my first thought was, "Well, there goes our moment in the spotlight." As much as this situation blows, it was nice to see them taken out to the woodshed like a real franchise for a little bit.