NHL Stanley Cup Finals: Vancouver Canucks Wake Up Sleeping Boston Bruins

The Vancouver Canucks didn't just poke a bear last night. It wasn't even asleep, this bear. It was awake, alert, and already a little ticked off as they poked, prodded, taunted it—and waited to see what would happen next.

What happened was eight goals: two on the power play, two short-handed and the final three coming within 110 seconds of each other.

With that the Boston Bruins took game three, 8-1.

The final insult hurled at the Boston beast was a late hit on Nathan Horton by Canucks’ defenseman Aaron Rome in the opening period of play. The hit knocked Horton to the ice and sent him to Mass General Hospital with a season-ending concussion.

It rattled the Bruins a little bit.

Not because they were intimidated. Because it's tough to get out there and take advantage of a five-minute power play when you just watched your teammate get hauled out of the action on a stretcher with an immobilized body.

In a post-game interview, Bruins coach Claude Julien insisted that he hadn't said anything special to his team during the first intermission break other than letting them know that it would be a good idea to go out and win one for their personal "Gipper", who would probably be watching from his hospital bed.

Eleven seconds into the second period, Andrew Ference put a slap shot past Roberto Luongo and got the party started. A little over four minutes later, 43-year-old Mark Recchi scored what would have proved to be the game winner, had the offense stopped there. Seven minutes and eight seconds after that, Brad Marchand scored one of the prettiest short-handed goals you’re ever likely to see.

The hit on Horton certainly woke up the Bruins offense.  It also seemed to open the penalty box doors a little more often as well.

The two teams combined for 145 minutes in penalties, the most racked up in a Stanley Cup Final game in 20 years.

Although the Bruins only accounted for 75 minutes of that time, after the game, Julien said that he did not accept the taunting moves of his team.  He insisted that, as a team, they "had to be better than that.” He was referring to, specifically, Mark Recchi and Milan Lucic, who had waved their fingers into the faces of Canuck players during a scrum.

Lucic had actually popped someone in the face during one of those scrums and later called his own behavior "classless;" chalking it up to the heat of the moment.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, as they say.

But in my mind, the addition of a so-called "goon", Shawn Thornton, in the Bruins line-up was a clear signal that the Bruins wanted to amp up the game’s violence.

Not, mind you, without provocation.

Nevertheless, they got what they asked for. Now Horton, the only player in NHL history to score two game-7-winning goals in the playoffs, will watch the remainder of the series from either a hospital bed or, if he’s lucky, a private booth in either Vancouver or Boston.

The escalating violence is a hard case to argue. The Canucks, having sufficiently poked and literally wounded the bear, were backpedaling away from its claws throughout the rest of the game last night.

Having lost one of their best players though, the problem now is that the bear is wounded and vulnerable. I can feel the heat rising up through the keyboard on this issue as the VERSUS announcers appear to be in support of the violence. “Part of the game,” one of them mouthed.

Easy for him to say from the comforts of his booth and color-coordinated necktie. Who’s going down next though? Charra? Recchi? One of the Sedin brothers? Then what will the NHL have? It’ll almost certainly be lousy hockey at that point. You might as well just surround the rink with a cage, let them leave their gloves on the bench and just have at it at center ice.

Speed and emotions are a potent mixture. These are the reasons that violence is part of the game of hockey. But escalation of that violence for the sheer sake of it should not be.

As Julien noted, the Bruins, in particular, need to be better than that.