Ex-Islanders Coach Milbury Accused of Assaulting 12-Year-Old Hockey Player

Former New York Islanders coach and General Manager Mike Milbury was charged with assaulting a 12- year-old player during a hockey game in Massachusetts.

Milbury, who was an assistant for one of the teams, also was charged with threatening to commit a crime and disorderly conduct, according to the Brookline Police Department’s website.

The 59-year-old Milbury is alleged to have “verbally berated and grabbed and shook” the boy during a game a week ago at the rink at Larz Anderson Park in Brookline after the child got into a “scrape” with Milbury’s son, who also was playing in the game, according to the Boston Herald. The newspaper didn’t say where it got the information.

Milbury will have to appear in Brookline District Court at a yet-to-be-determined date, according to ESPN.com.

“Mike Milbury denies any allegations that there was an assault of any kind,” his lawyer, Daniel Rabinovitz, said in an e-mailed statement. “He simply intervened in an altercation between his son and an opposing player. No one was struck, no one was injured and no one was threatened.”

Milbury, who is an NHL analyst for Comcast Corp.’s NBC as well as Canada’s CBC, played his entire 12-year National Hockey League career for the Boston Bruins, where he later coached for two seasons. He joined the Islanders as coach in 1995 and five months later also assumed the GM duties. Milbury quit the coaching role 46 games into the 1996-97 season, remained GM through January 2006, and stepped down as the team’s senior vice president of sports properties in May 2007.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mason Levinson in New York at mlevinson@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Sillup at msillup@bloomberg.net.