Canadian hockey team files $1 million lawsuit against The Michigan Daily

Jacob Trouba during training for USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program.

An elite junior hockey team in Canada has filed a $1 million defamation lawsuit against The Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan for an article the student newspaper published on the Fourth of July.  In the piece, the Daily alleges that officials with the Kitchener Rangers recently offered to pay a standout teen player a ton of money in hopes of enticing him to join their squad instead of attend UM.

Specifically, according to the Daily, a source connected to the 20-team Ontario Hockey League said the Rangers promised 18-year-old defenseman Jacob Trouba $200,000 if he played with them instead of the Wolverines for the next two years -- at which point Trouba plans to transition to the NHL.

Rangers officials are vehemently denying the existence of any such payment scheme.  The team's chief operating officer says they would not be able to hide that type of transaction, which is against OHL rules.

As The Detroit Free Pressexplains, "OHL teams are allowed to pay a player to go to school while he's with the team or allowed to pay him an education package after he's done playing. Teams are not allowed to give players money instead of the education package."

Trouba’s family also denies "any insinuation that the Kitchener Rangers have offered a financial package to Jacob."

The team's suit, filed in Canadian court-- Kitchener Rangers Junior A Hockey Club vs. The Michigan Daily, Matt Slovin and John Doe-- is against the paper, the article's writer Slovin, and the anonymous source Slovin cites.

According to the lawyer representing the Rangers, "When you're dealing with sources, one thing you have to be very careful about is relying on a source that has a bone to pick.  The Kitchener Rangers are very concerned . . . this was a source that was deliberately trying to cause harm to the Kitchener Rangers.  Again, we don't know if that's the case, but that's a very real concern."

In a post on his blog The United States of Hockey, Chris Peters contends the team's real concerns most likely involve perception issues, not legal ones.  As he writes, "Kitchener is currently dealing with an optics issue now.  By serving papers, they’ve made an official move to express not only to the Michigan Daily, but to the public, that the report is not true with any and all legal backing they have. . . . That said, I don’t see this getting incredibly far now. . . . Kitchener has planted the seed of doubt in the Daily’s report by taking legal action.  It’s their word against an anonymous source at this point."

Student Press Law Center attorney advocate Adam Goldstein agrees with Smith's doubts about the lawsuit's legal merits.

As an SPLC report confirms, he "believes the suit does not stand much of a chance of succeeding, given that the defendants are all United States citizens and likely do not have any assets in Canada.  He said that Canadian courts have in recent years increasingly dismissed attempts at 'libel tourism'-- the practice of pursuing a defamation case in a country like England or Canada, rather than the U.S."

The Daily has yet to comment on the merits of the suit, the source or the story.

UPDATE: On Thursday, July 12, The Michigan Daily issued the following statement on the situation:

"On June 28 The Michigan Daily published an article on its website that said hockey player Jacob Trouba was considering an offer to play for the Kitchener Rangers of the Ontario Hockey League. The article was updated to include further developments on July 2, July 3 and July 4. The Rangers and the Trouba family have denied the offer, and the Rangers have threatened legal action. The Daily stands behind the story and the reporter, Matt Slovin. The Daily will respond to threats of legal action in an appropriate fashion."

Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa, where he also advises The Minaret student newspaper. He maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters. A complete list of Campus Beat articles is here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.