Coach: The Pat Burns Story (11 page)

Some, particularly the younger crew, responded well to the drillsergeant tactics. Burns was adept at moulding men out of boys because they scared most easily. He was also prepared to give youth opportunity on a club where nudging out veterans was not the done thing. Mike Keane, who fully expected to be returned to Sherbrooke or worse at the end of training camp, instead found himself breaking through to the NHL roster, and many observers were critical of that decision.

“I fought everyone and hit everyone and just did whatever I could at camp to try and make an impression,” the future Canadiens captain would
recall many years later. “At the end of camp, he called me into his office and I thought, ‘Here it comes, I’m going back to Sherbrooke.’ But Pat looked at me and said, ‘Can you do what you did in camp for eighty games for me?’ I told him yes, and he told me to find a place to live in Montreal.”

Keane had arrived at camp as an undrafted player. Suddenly he was in The Show, to borrow a baseball term. “He gave me a chance. I was an English player, too, and they don’t get many chances in Montreal. There were other players who were more talented than I was. Things were written—‘What’s this guy doing here? He’s too small, he doesn’t have enough skill.’ But Pat believed in me and I never forgot that. I knew every day at practice, not only would I be under the microscope if not playing well, so would he.”

A third-line guy to start, and barely that, Keane benefited from Burns’s fondness for grinder types. “He was blue collar. He liked to work, he liked passion. He absolutely despised people who were talented but didn’t work. Pat appreciated people who put the time in, who’d do the shitty job to have success for the team.”

If what Burns had set out to accomplish—changing the culture of the club—irked some of those who considered themselves entitled, he refused to be rattled by it. From his cubicle in the dressing room, Keane watched quietly as adjustments were absorbed, not always placidly. “There were a lot of Type A’s in that dressing room. So you needed someone who was very strong in his beliefs, someone who said, ‘I’m coming in here with one goal and one voice, and it’s mine.’ I don’t think anyone else could have taken over that team. You look back at Larry Robinson, Bob Gainey, Bobby Smith, Mats Naslund, Patrick Roy, Guy Carbonneau—these are Hall of Fame players. Some were playing a lot where maybe they shouldn’t have. Pat had to figure out what was best for the team. Make no mistake, it didn’t make everyone happy. Behind closed doors, Pat had some fires he had to put out. Someone who didn’t have as strong a personality as Pat wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

There was resistance. There were furious arguments, a lot of which went over Keane’s head. “When they got into these heated shouting matches, Pat and some of the guys, believe it or not, it would go from English to French. They’d have a good old-fashioned fuck-you match and it would turn into French. It was funny because even in the minors, with Pat, when he got really irate he’d start talking French. Any time he got into arguments with Steph [Richer] and Peppy [Lemieux]—Claude is very Type A, Steph is Type A—it would be in French.”

In French or English, Montreal’s eightieth NHL season opened on a sour note, the Canadiens losing 3–2 in Buffalo on October 6, a game that illustrated the team’s offensive impotence, an area Burns was committed to addressing. A club that lately had been living and dying on defence needed to find its scoring mojo again. That was an irony, because defence was Burns’s coaching forte—very much of the check-or-sit mentality—and Montreal was the franchise that had invented firewagon hockey. The power play had become uncharacteristically enfeebled, clicking at a rate of 15.9 per cent the previous season, ranked twentieth in the league, though their penalty-killing success rate was a muscular 83.8 per cent, third-best. Also atypically, the Canadiens had been ninth in goal production, despite a contribution of fifty from Richer, the first Hab since Lafleur to hit those heights.

Burns explained he was attempting to make the team more spontaneous in its attacking style, but there was precious little evidence of that in their play. When the Maple Leafs dumped Montreal 6–2, right in the Forum, giving the Canadiens a 2–4 record in their first half-dozen games, the hand-wringing began in earnest. As the team sank into last place in their division, with a record of 4–7–1, Savard’s acumen in hiring an NHL-unproven coach was questioned. Tensions were thick in the dressing room as doubts took hold, especially among veterans. Robinson was so displeased with the team’s direction, he threatened to bolt. The team was clearly struggling. Burns had messed with a winning formula by altering the system instilled under Perron. Maybe he was just a dumb cop after all. “I knew what to expect,” said Burns, shrugging off the wailing and
gnashing of teeth. After the loss to Toronto, “one paper had me gone by Christmas—a front-page headline.”

None of the players were bitching to the media, however, perhaps mindful of their orchestration of Perron’s unceremonious dismissal six months earlier. “We’re still searching for our team’s character this season,” suggested Bobby Smith. “What I mean is, we still haven’t found out what type of team we will be.” Gainey expressed his frustration in a way that seemed to reflect poorly on Burns. “We don’t have any consistent coordination yet. We haven’t stabilized our lines. Perhaps in trial and error you can find the right chemistry.”

Burns persisted in preaching on-ice discipline as the necessary foundation for success. “The players have to adjust more to me. I’m a bit closer to them than Jean Perron was. Maybe there’s more communication. When I blow the whistle in practice for them to come to centre ice, I want them all to come there right away. I don’t want a few players not coming there at once. I don’t want guys throwing sticks.” Though
he
threw a few.

In an interview during this troubling stretch, Burns said, “When the time comes to talk, we’ll talk.” Pointing out that the club was coming off a season in which it had finished second overall in the league, with 103 points, and thus carrying high expectations, he said: “I’m a guy coming into a difficult situation. I’m a new coach with a new system and different ideas. There is an adjustment period. Many new coaches have problems at the start.”

It was a two-way adjustment, and an agonizing one for Burns. “I was out—fired, gone, goodbye. That’s the way it is here: win or else. I didn’t want to walk the streets at night. I figured somebody would run me over. One guy was coming to the games dressed as a chicken, with my name on his shirt. The pressure is unreal, and the spotlight is always there. I don’t like it, and I wish I could put it on somebody else, but I can’t. So I just have to deal with it.”

In late October, it was time for that talk. Burns called a meeting. “The team seemed to be separated between the young players and the old. I told them to wash their dirty clothes together.”

That comment gave short shrift to what, in actuality, was a severe rift cracking open between younger guys and older guys, between veterans and coach. Publicly, Burns always paid lip service to the wise counsel imparted by his elder statesmen. They were a fount of advice and the team’s backbone. But they were also busting his balls. He vacillated between awe and what some of those veterans construed as scorn, with the upstart exhibiting insufficient regard for their input, failing to adequately consult. Of course, Burns was striving to assert his primacy over the club. Further, he was attempting to cultivate a second tier of more youthful leadership, fully aware the club would soon need to transition into a post-Gainey, post-Robinson era.

Russ Courtnall, traded to Montreal from Toronto on November 7, sensed this internal tension immediately upon entering his new dressing room. “There were definitely some issues with some of the older players and Pat. And one of them was definitely with Larry [Robinson]. When I got there, Larry was threatening to quit the team, he was so unhappy. Eventually, they figured it out. I don’t know how, but within maybe a week it had been smoothed out. It all went away. Maybe Pat stopped challenging them or realized that these guys were assets he could use to help him become a better coach.”

In the locker room, Courtnall’s stall was next to Gainey’s. “Before every game, Pat would walk over to him with a piece of paper and they’d talk in French,” Courtnall recalls. “I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they’d point at all the players’ names on this paper and they’d have maybe a two-minute conversation. Then Pat would walk away. I know Pat respected Bob and Larry, but I think he realized he had to show that in front of all the other players. Once that happened, everything was fine.”

Had the Canadiens enjoyed a stronger start, there likely would not have been much conflict in the room, though it’s difficult to say which propelled which. “There was some fitting together early on in the year and, not being one who stops and analyzes a lot, I didn’t look at it as specifically towards me or the veterans,” says Gainey. “The whole team was off kilter. We’d had a pretty good run of five or six years, and this was
near the end of it. But as the year progressed, I think there was real harmony there. We found a rhythm that was inclusive with veterans and good young players and ultimately had a very smooth and enjoyable season.” Gainey attributes that segue to a combination of factors. “Players finding their place, their specific responsibilities on the team, having them either defined to them or just coming to understand them. Having the right players to fulfill those kinds of slots—a very good offensive centre, a very good goalie, a power-play defenceman, and we had all of those. So much of it is about momentum. Once things start to rumble in a positive way, it feeds on itself. That was one of those teams in the late ’80s that is often dismissed because of the lack of good players. But if you take a closer look at the lineup, you discover all these players [who] are in the Hall of Fame or who played on their national teams, in the U.S., in Europe, in Canada. You see older, very successful players from the generation before. You see younger players who went on to be successful in the following generation. It was a great combination.”

Burns had to make it work or there was no going forward. The new coach needed to show he was heeding the sagacity of veterans. There was veneration among teammates towards Gainey and Robinson, the only players left from Montreal’s four consecutive Stanley Cup teams, 1976 to 1979. “A big part of the group listened to those veterans, Gainey and Robinson,” says Roy. “They had a lot of influence. I think Pat and Bob were not eye to eye. I think Pat wanted to push Bob aside. And I thought that was a mistake.”

Gainey picks his words carefully. “I think Pat had an idea that he had to establish himself as the alpha male. If that was the case, where he was trying to push some of the veterans out, he probably instigated better play in those veterans by challenging them. With time, there was a balance there, where he understood what those players bring and maybe didn’t feel that he had to be as … not demanding or controlling, but clearly and visually in charge, that he could let things play out a bit more.”

The situation took some finessing by Burns, a bit of genuflecting that did not come easily to him. The scraping was acknowledged, wounded
feelings appeased, and the players made a commitment to coalesce behind Burns rather than invite more disruption from above. Burns was smart enough to relent somewhat in return, ditching what had clearly not been working in the early stages of the season, abandoning an offence-first system that wasn’t in his nature anyway. Montreal hadn’t been effective playing that way, and now they swung back to a grinding style, abetted by a resurgence of strong goaltending.

In other conspicuous ways, though, Burns was unyielding, sticking to his guns as enforcer-in-chief. He banned beer on the team bus and brought in a Breathalyzer device to show players how little alcohol it takes to cause impairment. Speaking from experience, Burns told the players: “The police don’t want to hear your story. All that’s important to them is you’ve had too many and you’ve killed someone with your car.” He restored devotion to curfew observation. Even charter flights were quieter than in recent years. Customarily, a coach sits in the front. Burns altered his perspective, sitting in the back of the plane, arms folded across his chest, eyes straight ahead. Players could feel that stare. It was a seating arrangement Burns would maintain throughout all his years in the NHL. “I just didn’t like a couple of things that were going on early in the season. I didn’t like the card games with the big money pots. Guys having a couple beers before a game, stuff you don’t want to see.”

His rules provoked no sedition. Apart from the new conduct regulations, players adjudged Burns to be less strict than Perron. Under the former coach, the athletes felt they were treated like adolescents and often responded like brats. “Pat gives the players a little bit more freedom and he doesn’t treat us like a bunch of schoolchildren,” said Robinson. “He has brought a lot of discipline to our club, something that was lacking in previous years. If you keep a dog chained up too long, it becomes a very angry dog, whereas, if you give your dog some freedom and still keep the leash tight, it becomes a different animal. Pat gives guys plenty of rope, lots of freedom, but if they don’t handle it the right way, then he reels it in. He’s established that he’s the boss, but he doesn’t flaunt it.”

Picking up the canine metaphor, Savard observed: “Pat doesn’t have a doghouse that players get in and then have trouble getting out of. He deals with problems on the spot and then forgets about them. That means the air is cleared around the team very quickly, which helps to make a good atmosphere.”

From the outset, Burns demonstrated the firm hand expected of him. No eyebrows were raised when he didn’t have Claude Lemieux in uniform after the player had turned in a tepid performance. Lemieux returned to the lineup and scored three goals in the next game. The coach benched Lemieux again for taking a bad penalty—actually a double minor and a game misconduct—and “putting on a floor show.” That let everyone know Burns was, as Savard had promised, “the man in charge.” And no one rushed to defend Svoboda when the young defenceman argued he didn’t deserve a suspension resulting from a high-stick infraction that Burns called “very, very stupid.”