Bruins Answer Hit With Goal After Goal

The Bruins, backed into a corner while one of their best players was being driven by ambulance to a hospital after taking a vicious predatory hit, came out slashing and snarling and baring their teeth. They scored four goals in the second period and added four more in the third en route to an 8-1 thrashing of the Vancouver Canucks in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals Monday at TD Garden.

It was another nasty game in an increasingly nasty series that the Canucks lead two games to one. Game 4 will be here Wednesday.

Long before the raucous celebration began amid a goal-scoring eruption in Boston’s first Cup finals home game in 21 years, there was grave concern. Nathan Horton, who scored the winning goals in Game 7 of the first round and of the Eastern Conference finals, was checked in the head by Vancouver defenseman Aaron Rome and crashed in a heap onto the ice, unconscious. He lay motionless for several minutes and was lifted off the ice on a stretcher and taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he reportedly was moving all his extremities.

Rome was given a five-minute major for interference — for hitting Horton after he had released the puck, not for hitting him in the head — and a game misconduct.

“We talked about playing for Horty,” said Mark Recchi, who had two goals. “It was tough to see him on the ice. We knew it was a late hit. The refs did a good job.”

The Bruins failed to take advantage on the power play and the first period ended 0-0. But they came out flying in the second period and took the lead after 11 seconds — the same amount of time it took Vancouver’s Alexandre Burrows to score in overtime and win Game 2 — when Andrew Ference’s long shot from the blue line fluttered through a maze of players and over goalie Roberto Luongo’s shoulder.

Rich Peverley, who took the injured Horton’s place on the first line, earned the assist.

Peverley also had a role in the second goal, a rare power-play score for Boston, when Recchi’s centering pass to him was accidentally knocked into the Vancouver net by Ryan Kesler at 4 minutes 22 seconds.

It was the first of two goals for Recchi, whose career playoff total is now 61, tops among active players. The goal avalanche was on.

At 11:30, Brad Marchand scored a short-handed goal, playing the puck off the boards to himself to go around Henrik Sedin, blowing past Kesler and crossing all the way in front of Luongo before lifting the puck over him.

At 15:47, David Krejci closed out rally with his 11th goal of the playoffs, tying him with Tampa Bay’s Martin St. Louis for the postseason lead.

Daniel Paille added a second Boston short-handed goal in the third before Recchi scored again, and Chris Kelly and Michael Ryder scored late in the game, with Luongo inexplicably left in the game.

The 8-1 result was the most lopsided in the finals since Colorado beat Florida by the same score in Game 2 of the 1996 series.

Bruins goalie Tim Thomas was brilliant, finishing with 40 saves and beaten only by an impossible-to-stop backdoor shot from Jannik Hansen with 6 minutes 7 seconds to play. Thomas almost got to that one, too.

Thomas robbed Mason Raymond twice late in the first period. In the third, he stopped Henrik Sedin right in front of the net simply by flattening Sedin with a forearm.

On Sunday, a reporter asked Thomas whether he was thinking about adjusting his style after the Canucks scored a late goal to win Game 1 and an overtime goal in Game 2 while Thomas was playing outside his crease.

“No, I have a pretty good idea how to play goalie,” said Thomas, who set a league record in the regular season with a .938 save percentage. His .930 playoff save percentage leads all goalies who went beyond the second round. “I’m not going to be taking suggestions or advice at this time.”

He described his block on Henrik Sedin as something he learned to do after similar situations in practice.

“I get scored on in practice if I sit back and try to react to where he sets the puck down with his hand,” Thomas said. “I had one one-hundredth of a second to make a decision on what I was going to do. That’s the way I decided to play it.”

The game’s ugliness took a new turn in the third period. Daniel Sedin, Ference, Shawn Thornton, Kesler and Dennis Seidenberg were each given 10-minute misconducts. Kesler and Seidenberg fought. Milan Lucic taunted Burrows by thrusting his fingers toward Burrows’s mouth in a continuation of the hostilities surrounding Burrows’s bite of Patrice Bergeron in Game 1.

Bruins Coach Claude Julien, who said Monday morning he would not stand for that kind of taunting on his team after Vancouver’s Maxim Lapierre did it in Game 2, said he was “disappointed” by Lucic’s actions.

“I don’t want that stuff in our game,” Julien said. “I think we have to be better than that.”

The worst incident took place 5:07 into the game. Horton was crossing the Vancouver blue line, having delivered a pass to his left, when Rome stepped up and delivered a thunderous shoulder check to Horton’s head.

Horton was looking the other way as Rome crashed into him.

It was unclear whether the check was illegal under Rule 48, which bans blindside hits to the head. Horton was looking to his side, but Rome hit him from straight in front — a “north-south” hit to the head, in hockey parlance.

That is legal in the N.H.L., even though it is illegal in most junior and senior leagues around the world.

Horton lay motionless, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Doctors and trainers worked on him for some five minutes until a neckboard and gurney were brought out and he was wheeled off.

Rome was given a five-minute major for interference — for hitting Horton after he had released the puck, not for hitting him in the head — and a game misconduct.

Rome may face a suspension from the league, a decision that will be made by the disciplinarian for this series, Mike Murphy, an N.H.L. vice president.

“Looking back at the hit, what I recall was that it was a blindside hit, that we talked about taking out of the game,” Julien said. “Let the league care of it. We’re trying to clean that part of the game out.”

But Canucks Coach Claude Vigneault disagreed.

“I mean, that hit was head-on, player looking at his pass,” he said. “It was a little bit late. I don’t think that’s the hit that the league is trying to take out of the game.”

Vigneault added: “You never want to see that, but this is a physical game.”

It promises to become more physical, and more nasty, on Wednesday night.


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