Linesperson Bevan Mills worked the 600th regular-season game of his NHL career last night in St. Louis, taking the lines for the Winnipeg Jets’ visit to the Blues.
Mills, 38, was joined on the crew by referees Tom Chmielewski and Jake Brenk, with Kyle Flemington as his partner on the lines. The Surrey, British Columbia, native reached the mark just shy of ten years after his NHL debut, having also worked 46 Stanley Cup Playoff games along the way.
Officiating runs in the family. Mills first put on the stripes at age 12 with Surrey Minor, following his grandfather, an official in the junior and senior ranks. His brother Aaron also later worked his way to the American Hockey League as an official. Mills spent more than a decade in the British Columbia Hockey League, where he won the 2013 Brad Lazarowich Award as the league’s top linesman, alongside eight seasons in the Western Hockey League. His amateur resume included the 2013 Memorial Cup Final in Saskatoon, the 2016 Memorial Cup in Red Deer, the bronze medal game at the 2015 World Juniors in Toronto, and the 2015 IIHF World Championship in Prague and Ostrava, where he was the lone Canadian official selected.
With injuries thinning the full-time lines staff early in the 2016-17 campaign, Mills got the call-up, making his NHL debut on November 29, 2016, as the Anaheim Ducks hosted the Montreal Canadiens. He split time between the AHL and NHL for three seasons – reaching 100 NHL games – before the league promoted him to full-time status for the 2019-20 season, alongside referee Peter MacDougall and linesperson James Tobias.
Mills made his Stanley Cup Playoff debut on May 16, 2021, and has since built his playoff total to 46 games. A decade after that first call-up from the WHL, game No. 600 came on Tuesday night in St. Louis – not bad for a kid who first picked up a whistle to get extra ice time in Surrey.
