Bruins respond to loss of teammate with scoring barrage
BOSTON -- As Nathan Horton lay near motionless on the ice, the Boston Bruins' concern was drawn to the latest concussed player.
Horton, strapped to a headboard, was carted off the ice and play eventually resumed in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The task, however, remained the same, even if clearing the puck and back-checking were obscured slightly by concern for a teammate's wellbeing: the Bruins, who had dropped the first two games of the best-of-7 series to the Canucks, needed a victory at TD Garden on Monday night to keep their Cup hopes realistic.
"I don't know if it sounds cold, but it's part of the job," said Bruins defenseman Andrew Ference, who scored the game's first goal en route to an 8-1 rout of the Vancouver Canucks. "You try to throw it in your back pocket and lock your emotions away a bit. Your concern is there, but you can't sit there and let it kind of eat up space in your head."
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Ference said word spread on the bench that Horton, the team's second-leading scorer in the playoffs, was lucent enough to communicate with teammate Milan Lucic before he was taken to a nearby hospital. The Bruins announced later in the first period that Horton was moving his extremities and the team provided no further updates.
Scoring -- not retaliation, at least immediately after the collision initiated by Vancouver defenseman Aaron Rome -- was on the Bruins' agenda. Rome, who was ejected, received a five-minute interference major, although the Bruins failed to convert on the power play.
"We didn't get the results," Bruins coach Claude Julien said. "But the one thing you can't do is take away our momentum and [the power play] didn't do that. So we're still in decent shape. I don't think we're discouraged more than we realized we had to stay with it."
Scoring came easier the rest of the way as Boston put eight of the 31 shots over the final 40 minutes of the game past Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo. The Bruins scored two shorthanded goals (Brad Marchand and Daniel Paille) and two power-play goals (Mark Recchi and Michael Ryder) as the rout was on.
"We knew what this game meant," Boston captain Zdeno Chara said. "It was a big game and obviously we approached it that way and I thought we were really sharp mentally and physically."
Not that it makes it an easier to stomach, but this wasn't the first time the Bruins lost a high-scoring forward to a concussion this season. Marc Savard, who absorbed a hit last season from Pittsburgh's Matt Cooke that spurred the league to adopt a stricter stance on head hits, had to shut it down in January after his latest concussion. Patrice Bergeron was lost for the first two games of the conference finals after he suffered his third career concussion in Game 4 of the second round against Philadelphia.
"We lost a pretty good player," Julien said. "We'll have to move some players around. Right now I haven't really made my roster up for next game."
The game did devolve once the score became even more lopsided. The demarcation zone appeared to be the 11:16 mark of the third period as five the game's 10 misconducts (counting Rome's ejection) were whistled. Misconducts were called on Vancouver's Ryan Kesler, Alex Burrows, Kevin Bieksa and Daniel Sedin, and Boston's Andrew Ference (twice), Shawn Thornton, Milan Lucic and Dennis Seidenberg.
Thornton, who made his first appearance in the series, said he doubts there will be any carryover to Game 4 on Wednesday.
"It's a new game," he said. "It's the playoffs, I think they'll think about this game until midnight as will we. Maybe 1 [a.m.] since it was a later game. You'll get some sleep and move on."
