BOSTON (AP) - Bruins forward Nathan Horton was taken off the ice on a stretcher, strapped to a backboard, after a frightening collision with Canucks defenseman Aaron Rome.
Horton had just passed the puck to Milan Lucic and was coming over the blue line when Rome lowered a shoulder into him and knocked him backward. Horton, who appeared to hit his head on the ice, lay motionless, with his right arm in the air, as trainers rushed to attend to him.
Rome was called over to the penalty box, then ushered off the ice with a major for interference and a game misconduct.
The crowd gasped when the replay was shown on the scoreboard.
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The Canucks have the same guys out there as in Game 2. That means Dan Hamhuis is out, and former Bruin Andrew Alberts is in on defense.
Hamhuis missed his second straight game after hurting himself delivering a check on Milan Lucic midway through Game 1.
Also in the lineup for Vancouver is Manny Malhotra, who had been out since March 16 after taking a puck to the face and having two operations on his left eye. The team thought his season was over, but he returned to practice three weeks ago and returned for Game 2.
He took the opening faceoff and lost it to Patrice Bergeron.
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The Bruins have shaken up the lineup a bit in an effort to get more scoring.
Rookie Tyler Seguin is a scratch for the first time in the Stanley Cup finals. In comes Shawn Thornton, who’s one of only two Bruins to have won the Cup before. He was on the Anaheim Ducks team that won it all in 2007.
The other Bruin with his name on the trophy is Mark Recchi, who played for the Pittsburgh Penguins when they won it in 1991 and for the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006. (There’s no truth to the rumor that the 43-year-old Recchi, the oldest player in the NHL, played for the Montreal Maroons when they won it all in 1926.)
Seguin has been a puzzle for the Bruins to figure out.
The No. 2 overall pick in the draft, Seguin sat out the first 11 games of the playoffs before getting into the lineup in the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Tampa Bay Lightning. He had a goal and an assist in Game 1, then two goals and two assists in Game 2 _ but he hasn’t scored since.
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The Stanley Cup finals are back in Boston tonight for the first time since 1990.
Game 3 is at the TD Garden, and the Bruins and Vancouver Canucks have finished their warmups and headed back to the locker rooms for a last-minute pep talk.
The crowd is still filtering in, but already there seem to be a lot of fans in blue and green sprinkled through the stands. It’s about 3,000 miles from Vancouver _ that’s about 5,000 kilometers, for those of you scoring in Canada. But it’s only about a 5 hour drive from Montreal or Quebec and the Eastern provinces.
It’s the first time the finals have been played in the TD Garden. When the Bruins played the Edmonton Oilers in 1990, the old Boston Garden was still up.
The Oilers won in ’90 in five games. That was their fifth title in seven years, and the second time in three years that they went through Boston to win the Cup. In 1988, playing in the old Garden, the heat in the un-air conditioned building caused fog to rise from the ice and forced the officials to stop play from time to time to let it clear. But with the score tied 3-3 in second period, the power went out.
The game was canceled and replayed in its entirety in Edmonton, which won to complete the sweep.
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