Coach: The Pat Burns Story (37 page)

Pshaw, Burns scoffed to media queries that he might come to grief with the club president. “Everybody is afraid of the myth of Harry Sinden. Harry Sinden believes in one thing: being loyal to a team and winning.
He’s an old-school guy, and I like that. I think it’s important to be loyal. Don’t you think it’s about time we started getting back to that?” Sure, he was schmoozing the boss, but Sinden was glowingly approving in this first-trimester phase of their relationship. The notoriously skinflint Bruins organization had assured Burns they’d loosen the purse strings and sign quality talent. Sinden was agreeable when his coach quickly reached out to Dave Ellett, a favourite from Toronto days. Ellett was a free agent. “It was the first call I got, Pat phoning me directly. He said, ‘I want you here—what’s it going to take?’ I was nervous about going to Boston. The organization had a bad reputation and my agent tried to talk me out of it. But I had discussions with Pat and he assured me that things had changed there.” Ellett became a Bruin. Then Burns coaxed Ken Baumgartner—enforcer with the face of a damaged angel and part-time MBA student—into the Boston fold. “You guys are gonna love the Bomber!” he crowed to reporters.

The Bruins had just come off a ghastly season in which they’d committed the double crime of being both bad and boring. In Burns, Sinden had banked on a persona who would help fill the seats at the new FleetCenter and staunch the bleed of bailing season-ticket holders. A high-profile coach was part of the blueprint to rebuild the franchise. The other pillar of Bruin rejuvenation was a seventeen-year-old by the name of Joe Thornton, Boston’s salve for finishing last in the then-twenty-six-team NHL. The six-foot-four-inch teenager was the first-overall selection in the entry draft and the most highly touted hope since Bobby Orr. With their second pick, eighth overall, the Bruins took Russian mini-bull Sergei Samsonov. “I patted him on the shoulder,” marvelled Burns. “It was like patting a rock.”

So, the Bruins had legendary defenceman Raymond Bourque, a couple of projected stars who could just as easily flame out, and a bunch of other guys Burns admitted he’d never heard of. Assembling his new charges at training camp, a chaw of tobacco shoved beneath his upper lip, the coach declared, “Unless you’re Raymond Bourque, I don’t know you.” As an aside, he added: “I have ties and underwear older than some of those guys out there.”

Rapped as a coach who cleaved to veterans and couldn’t manage youngsters well—as if he’d never developed kids in juniors who stepped directly into the NHL—Burns pledged to be patient with his fledglings and balance sternness with praise. There was no doubt at camp that he had his players’ attention. They were obedient and energetic, glad to have someone in charge who brought structure to their game plan, even though Burns could never be described as someone who excelled at Xs-and-Os instruction. As one columnist observed, “Burns is the kind of coach, who, when he senses a lull, refers to the front and back cover of his playbook; either side will suffice when used for hitting someone upside the head.”

Burns was insistent, however, on bringing “Jumbo Joe” Thornton along slowly, with baby steps. “I will not make the same mistakes some teams do with their number-one draft choices.” But he forgot who was really calling the shots. Here was sown the seed of his initial contretemps with Sinden. For the same reason Sinden had peeled open Boston’s clammy wallet to pay Burns, he wanted full bang for his multimillion-bucks investment in Thornton. Just eighteen now, the curly-haired youth would put fannies in the seats and surely provide goal production spark. Burns wanted him to ripen in the minors. “Is it better to keep him here and not play him?” Burns asked, making his case in the media. “Or is it better that he go down, play in the World Junior tournament? We’ll all have to sit down, management and the coaching staff, list all the fors and againsts. What’s the best and proper decision for Joe Thornton?” Coach and GM argued heatedly about it, but this wasn’t a battle Burns could possibly win. “We had this big stud, number-one pick,” says Sinden. “He was the next Eric Lindros in everybody’s mind. Pat looked at him and said, ‘He’s not ready.’ But I felt that we couldn’t send this kid down.” The kid broke his arm in an exhibition game, slashed by Pittsburgh’s Stu Barnes, so that deferred the issue for a bit. But he was in the lineup by game four of the regular season. Sinden—and his assistant, O’Connell, who concurred—could foist the youngster on Burns, but the coach controlled Thornton’s ice time. Turning a deaf ear to Sinden, he eased the youth in gently, usually deployed on the fourth line, occasionally scratched entirely, such that, by
his twenty-first NHL game, Thornton didn’t have a single point. This was not going to earn the putative Boston saviour rookie-of-the-year laurels. “We kept him here but he didn’t play much,” says Sinden, reflecting on poor choices. “He was ready in some ways, but Joe was still a kid. Some of them come in at eighteen and they’re fairly mature. Joe wasn’t.” With the wisdom of hindsight, Sinden concedes that Burns was on the button. “Pat was right on that one.” It was Samsonov, with a year in the International Hockey League under his belt, who provided the buzz that year—and copped the rookie award at its conclusion.

The ’97–98 Bruins came charging out of the gate, Burns, as was his forte, squeezing the most out of marginal players. “Pat’s strength was that he got everyone in their right roles,” says O’Connell. “It’s really what he does best—gets people to become a team. He motivates each player to perform his role for the betterment of the team.” It was big-yawn hockey, rigid and risk averse, but, in the coach’s defence, he didn’t have much to work with, and defence could be taught. A newspaper cartoon depicted Burns hypnotizing fans by dangling a puck like a watch fob. Queried about the merits of “The Trap,” dead-zone hockey, he got his back up. “We had to give it a name, that’s the worst thing we ever did. The positional play you’re talking about? We don’t play the trap. We play a positional game, and that has been going on for twenty-five years.”

O’Connell fails to see the difference, as practised by Burns, while acknowledging management had known exactly what they were getting. “It was a trap mentality. Pat liked big, bruising guys but his was not a style that forced the issue. It was more of a classic ‘let’s wait, get in our position, and wait, and wait, and then we counter.’ He’d done that everywhere he’d been. The trap was developed in the Montreal system, and that was Pat’s belief. Everybody knew he was going to do it, but still, he was very good at getting them to do it, better than anyone else. And we won playing that style. Some of his ideas you might not agree with, but it’s a very successful way of playing which many teams have adopted. It does enable teams without talent to win. It gives them a chance because of how it’s structured. The NHL today, the way I look at
it, there’s five not-so-good teams and the other twenty-five are about the same.”

On New Year’s Eve 1997, Boston tied the Leafs 2–2 in Toronto, the first time Burns had graced the Gardens since packing hastily in the night. The Bruins were 17–17–7, vastly improved from the squad that had finished in the cellar eight months earlier. Their hockey may have been wincingly dull, but it was adequately effective because players had bought into the coach’s vision. At the All-Star break, they ranked a solid sixth in the Eastern Conference, light years removed from the pitiful lot that brought Burns in as Original Six fix-it man. The postseason beckoned again. “You want to get to that ‘Spring Dance,’ ” Burns enthused, “you’d better bring your Kodiak work boots and not your patent-leather shoes.” A 4–1 win over the Islanders clinched the playoff berth on April 9, and Burns’s name was touted once more for a Jack Adams award.

“The best coaches are the ones that keep people on their toes, keep players honest in terms of knowing what’s expected of them,” says Ray Bourque. “Pat made what was expected of us very clear from the beginning. He was a coach I learned a lot from. I’d never realized how detailed he was as a coach. This was a guy who believed you had to play defence—not just defencemen but centres and wingers too. He kept harping on it, and that’s how his drills were set up. These are the drills I’ve brought along with me, coaching my sons’ teams, and if I were ever to coach in the NHL—not that I would—the drills I would use. We practised them two or three times a week. Every single forward knew exactly what he had to do in the defensive zone. We were very, very well coached.”

The turnaround was remarkable: the Bruins were thirty points better than the previous year. “It was a combination of things,” says Bourque. “We had those two first-round picks. Sergei probably had a bigger impact than Joe off the bat. But we’d also signed some free agents and got a lot better in terms of talent and character, special guys like Rob DiMaio and Timmy Taylor, role players but major leaguers who were really important in the room. Probably we were a team that overachieved because a lot of
people were not looking at us to have that kind of jump. And Pat was the one who jelled everything together.”

Against Washington in the first round, the Bruins’ Brigadoon season dissolved in six games, two of which went into double OT. Before game six, Burns shaved off the goatee he’d worn most of the year, hoping to change his team’s luck, to no avail. Yet elimination didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of a club that had pulled itself off the scrap heap. If Sinden and O’Connell yearned for razzle-dazzle, it was incumbent on them to lasso the talent in the off-season. Bring me the horses, said Burns, “and I’ll give you tic-tac-toe. I don’t think our style is boring, but you have to adapt to the team you have. Firewagon hockey, that’s what we called it in the old days, like in the past with the Flying Frenchmen and the French Connection. That’s all nice and fine if you have that personnel. But if you don’t have it, you have to adapt.”

Could the coach be any clearer? Or, with a third Jack Adams bestowed in June, any taller in the saddle? “This is our Academy Awards,” Burns beamed in accepting the accolade. “We’ve directed films all year long, and there are stars of the movies … and you have the directors, who are the coaches.” In a serene state of mind, he took Line to the Caribbean for a holiday. At the time of his hiring in Boston, Burns had warned his girlfriend, “I’m different in hockey than out of hockey.” Line would find out, he said, “if she can stand me.” Evidently, she could. The couple married in Anguilla. Bourque was the best man. “My wife and I were in St. Barts. We took a nice little boat ride over to where Pat and Line were.” The foursome had become warm friends, Bourque’s wife, Christiane, especially cozy with Line. Bourque remembers the lovely nuptials: “The ceremony was on the beach. We had dinner with them afterwards and went back to St. Barts that night.”

In Boston, however, it was no longer all hearts and flowers. The first inkling that the coach’s wishes were irrelevant came with management’s failure to protect Ellett and Baumgartner in the expansion draft. Surviving the exposure, Ellett was relegated to bit player in his second Boston year.
He fingers assistant GM O’Connell as the villain. “He’s the one who ended up pulling out the rug from under Burnsie because Burnsie didn’t like him and wouldn’t listen to him. That’s why I got shit on there, because I was one of Pat’s guys. First year, I never missed a game; then all of a sudden, in the second year, I’m in the press box. Pat told me, ‘I can’t help it. But once the playoffs start, it’s my team and I can play who I want, and you’re in.’ The next year, they got rid of me.”

Year two for Burns in Boston began with four key training-camp holdouts and a failed comeback attempt by Cam Neely. It soon became apparent the team seemed less cohesive than the year before. Tensions developed over ice time, especially for Samsonov, who experienced a midseason goal drought. A few stories appeared about things no longer so rosy in Black and Yellow Country. Ellett suspects some of these early anti-Burns barbs were planted by management “because they couldn’t boss Pat around.” Yet, to Ellett, Burns seemed happier and more relaxed. “Coaching had become more enjoyable for him. He learned that he didn’t have to be as hard on people every day. It wasn’t killer practices all the time, yelling and screaming. He was having fun.”

The team was hard to figure out, though, consistent only in its inconsistency. O’Connell artlessly rebuked Burns’s handling of Samsonov to a reporter. Stung, Burns swung back in a radio interview. “I don’t question Mike’s drafts. He has pressure once a year, and that’s the twenty-seventh of June or whenever the draft is. Second-guessing will always be part of management and I think that’s normal, but doing it publicly is another thing. I’m hurt. I would have appreciated it more if this had been talked about behind closed doors. Mike had an opportunity to coach this team before me. Maybe he thinks he should have been the coach. If Mike wants my job, he knows how to get it.” O’Connell hastily apologized. “This is the last thing I wanted to happen.” They kissed and made up but the war of words would escalate. “That was not a real compatible situation,” says Sinden.

From January into February of that second season, the Bruins went into a 0–6–2 skid. Burns told Line to take a vacation by herself. Stress was making him more grouchy and distant than usual. “It changes your life
around because you’re taking it home more. Often, you’ll sit there and people are talking to you and you don’t hear them. My wife will be talking to me and she’ll say, ‘You’re not listening to me.’ And I’ll say, ‘Yup, I’m not.’ It’s because your mind is churning all the time.”

Burns sought the opinion of everyone—from reporters to the FleetCenter’s janitorial staff. “I’m not a one-man show. I listen to everybody, but I’m the one on the firing line. Sometimes I have a fraction of a second to make a decision. That’s what I like about Harry. He’s the best general manager I’ve ever had because he’s been there as a coach, he knows. Serge was never there. Cliff was never there.”

A late-season surge vaulted the Bruins over Buffalo into sixth place in the East. They finished with the exact same point total as ’97–98 but had to work harder for it. In the opening playoff round, Boston drew Carolina as an opponent. It was a tight, closely contested affair with Bruins netminder Byron Dafoe—who racked up ten regular-season shutouts—a standout, impenetrable in two of the six games. That triumph got Boston one round further, but, for their labours, they now had to confront Buffalo and dominator goalkeeper Dominik Hasek. Bruins made the sublime Hasek look ordinary in game one of the Eastern Conference semifinals. Burns sought to extinguish some of Hasek’s aura: “I think he let some goals in this year. His goals-against average was not zero, zero, zero—was it? The guy has been scored on before.”