BOSTON – It wasn’t quite the relief that an overtime victory against the Red Wings provided, but it was good all the same to see Kevan Miller and Colin Miller both return to the Bruins lineup.
Kevan Miller scored the game’s first goal, his first of the season, and snapped a 41-game goal-scoring drought dating to last February in the 4-3 overtime win against Detroit on Tuesday night at TD Garden.
“The first period was a little, you know, kind of feeling it out. I think overall we had a pretty good first period. [Our] second period wasn’t our greatest but we finished pretty hard in the third. It was a good first game,” said Miller. “It was a great feeling on the bench and everyone was really excited. I think the feeling in the room was that we weren’t going to be beat tonight.”
The other half of the third pairing, Colin Miller, struggled a bit more in his first game in a couple of weeks. He finished with four hits and three giveaways in 17:09 of ice time while also avoiding any real damage in the defensive zone. Claude Julien said both players understandably appeared a little rusty in their return from respective injuries, but the strengths of both will add different facets to the B's back end.
“It was okay. I think Colin had a bit of a tough night there at times. But Kevan Miller has been playing his off-side all year. He’s better on the right and we all know that, but he’s a guy that’s a right-hand shot that’s willing to play on the left,” Julien said of Kevan Miller, who finished with a goal and a plus-1 rating along with three hits in 15-plus minutes. “So, overall I think they did a decent job for a couple of guys that hadn’t been in for a while, and had to step in as a pairing.”
Even if it was a bit of an expectedly uneven performance from the Millers in their returns, it also stabilized a B’s third pair that had been picked apart a bit in the four-game losing streak when Joe Morrow and John-Michael Liles were trying to hold down the fort. So, it was a good step forward for the Bruins defensemen and a huge leap forward for the entire team in nabbing a victory that ended their slide.