Coach: The Pat Burns Story (15 page)

Claude Lemieux was looking for a fresh start after a season of knocking heads with Burns, retreating from his request for a trade if their grudge match wasn’t resolved, and allegedly chastened by his dying-Camille humiliation in the playoffs. “I’m sure Claude will think twice about diving again,” said Brian Skrudland. “He’s sorry about his little antics.” Yet Lemieux reported to camp with some excess weight, played one game and reaggravated a groin injury, the existence of which was doubted by many observers. It was real. On November 1, Lemieux underwent surgery to repair a torn muscle in the abdominal wall, out for two months. Stéphane Richer just wanted to erase the previous season from memory, reporting fit and champing at the bit to atone. “Shape’s not a problem. With me, it is always in my head.”

When a false rumour about Richer being gay sucked him into another media vortex, his head almost exploded. The player had, for more than a year, shared a house with a male friend—hardly unusual, but those living arrangements, slyly skewed, provided oxygen for scandal. Richer took his frustration to Burns, who agreed it might be best to bring the
innuendo out into the open, to confront the scuttlebutt head on. So Richer called
Le Journal de Montréal
and sought an interview to deny the gossip. He was, in fact, quite the ladies’ man, as teammates could well attest. “I was sick and tired of hearing that crap,” Richer told reporters. “It wasn’t fair to me and my family. I wanted it to stop. Me, I’m going out with a lot of different girls, but who says I have to be married?”

Not long afterwards, Burns opined that an out-of-the-closet gay hockey player was unthinkable in the NHL. “An avowed homosexual, that would never be accepted in hockey—never.” Everybody concurred. This was nearly a quarter-century ago, and no one could foresee that same-sex marriage would one day be legal in Canada—not that progressive attitudes would remove the stigma for professional athletes in macho sports.

It was typical of hockey in Montreal, though, that even the whispers should be shrill. The game exists in a heightened atmosphere there, a hothouse ecosystem of rumour and melodrama—and expectations. From the moment training camp opened, Burns tried to temper assumptions of a Stanley Cup final redux. He knew the recalibrated Canadiens weren’t nearly as good as conventional wisdom might suggest.

There were bright spots, however, when the training bivouac opened. One was Stéphan Lebeau, coming off an MVP and AHL rookie-of-the-year season in Sherbrooke. Lebeau had been called up for a single game the previous spring and watched the playoffs from the stands as part of the club’s taxi squad, dressed only for practice. He was small, and Burns hated small. That he was listed as five foot ten in the media guide was a dodge. “When they took the measurement, I put two hockey pucks under my feet,” Lebeau chuckles. “I’m more like five foot eight and a half when I really stretch in the morning.” But his offensive skills were no deception. “I was a scoring machine.”

The twenty-one-year-old Lebeau made the roster out of camp, yet Burns remained skeptical and limited the centre’s ice time, preferring the banging qualities of a Brent Gilchrist. “I was not physical,” Lebeau admits. “I was often playing on Pat’s first power play, but five-on-five, I had limitations. I was identified as a small hockey player that didn’t like to go
into traffic, which I don’t think was the case. I put good numbers on the board for the amount of ice time that I had. But when you get that sticker put on you, it is very difficult to peel it off your skin. I just had a way of doing things differently, perhaps, more using my head than my physicality. That was not the best type of hockey player for Pat Burns.”

Francophone reporters, especially, would harangue Burns all season for underutilizing Lebeau, yet again advancing the slag that the coach was cool to French players. It was useless for Burns to point out that he was born in Montreal to a French-Canadian mother and was bilingual. He was profiled as the Irishman, not the Frenchman. “The French media were really pushing in my favour, saying I was not treated properly,” recalls Lebeau, a native of Saint-Jérôme, just north of Montreal. “Pat became a little sensitive about that because they were coming back and coming back. He’d say, ‘I’m the one in charge, I’m the boss.’ ”

Rather deftly, Lebeau played both sides of the fence, tugging at his francophone forelock for French reporters when they came ’round, but never overtly criticizing his coach. He also understood that, in Montreal, youngsters had to wait their turn, no matter who they were.

“We had a funny relationship, me and Pat,” says Lebeau. “He was a policeman in his previous life, and I think he was also a policeman as coach. He really behaved like the man of authority, to the point of intimidation. That’s how I felt, especially as a rookie. But even veterans were often scared of him, of his reaction. At the same time, he was respected because, despite having that attitude, he was also
respectful
, which I think is how he ended up keeping his players around him.”

At one fraught juncture, Burns took Lebeau for lunch across the street from the Forum. “He said he had nothing against me, it was just a coaching decision. He said he believed in me and he asked me to continue working hard. But Pat was not an easy person to deal with. In the dressing room, he could pass right in front of you for five days in a row without even looking at you. And then, on another morning, he could act like you were his best buddy—‘How’s your family doing?’ So you’d
say, ‘Okay, now he’s going to talk to me.’ And the next day, he’d be back to walking by without looking at you again. He was tough to read.”

Frequently dour and frightening to his players, Burns was also an unregenerate prankster, endlessly devising tricks to pull on the guys and good-humoured about those pulled on him. This was lowbrow, Three Stooges slapstick. “There was one really funny joke he pulled on Patrick Roy,” recalls Sylvain Lefebvre, who was then in his rookie season, another Sherbrooke graduate. “He had some powder that police use for getting fingerprints. When it gets wet, it turns blue. He put some in Patrick’s mask before practice. When Patrick started sweating, his face turned blue and he didn’t even realize it. He took off his mask and all the guys were practically falling down laughing.”

Lefebvre was the son of a Quebec police officer and so had some insight into what should be expected from the cop/coach when he arrived at camp. “Pat was tough but fair. Maybe there were some personality clashes, but Pat wanted to put his foot down early, make sure everybody was on board. Maybe he allowed a little more leeway with the veterans, but not that much, and that’s what made him respected.” Burns’s squabbling partner could be Mats Naslund one night, Stéphane Richer the next; nobody was safe or coach’s pet.

The extent to which these set-tos and perpetual ice-time disagreements were documented in the press reflected the media’s favourites. Says Lefebvre: “I mean, if he didn’t play me one night, you didn’t hear about it.”

A star Burns never crossed was Roy, largely because there was no reason. On a team that would be plagued by injuries all year—283 man-games lost due to ailments by the time playoffs rolled around, 126 more than the previous season—Roy was Burns’s ace in the hole.

“Pat was very good to me,” says Roy. “He would talk to me a lot. I felt he had confidence in myself, and that really helped. What I truly appreciated was he would explain everything and, when I was not playing, why.” In Burns’s first season, goaltending duties were generally split between Roy and Brian Hayward, the latter most often starting on the road. “The big
change came the following year,” says Roy. “I remember going into his office and he said, ‘You know, you just won the Vezina and we lost in the finals.’ I told him I was ready to take on more games; I wanted to see if he felt the same way. I was nervous because I wasn’t sure how he would react, and I surely didn’t want to change my relationship with him. Well, he didn’t say much. But from then, he started giving me more games and more games and more games. He was the first to give me close to sixty games. He really gave me the net.”

And never considered taking it back, even when Roy surrendered three goals in fifty-seven seconds—a pair through the wickets—against the Bruins in a 3–2 loss in November, unflustered that his ace might be overloaded with work. Of far more concern was the continuing spate of injuries, which didn’t diminish expectations. “Because we wear the red-white-and-blue sweaters, they expect us to win,” said Burns of both fans and the team’s media entourage. But they beat Calgary in a Cup final rematch 3–2, reasserted Canadian proprietary rights over the game by defeating the Soviet Wings 2–1 in a January exhibition game at the Forum, and were 23–19–6 by the All-Star break, with Burns behind the Wales (Eastern) Conference bench. Nobody was remotely surprised when he padded out the ballot selection by naming three of his players to the roster: Richer, Chelios and Shayne Corson. For the actual game, his presence as coach was almost superfluous, simply opening the gate for superstar Mario Lemieux—fittingly, the spectacle was hosted by Pittsburgh—who scored three goals in the first period as the Wales Conference dumped the Campbell Conference 12–7.

More stimulating was a late-January match with the Division-leading Bruins, marked by a heated exchange of words with his opposite number, Mike Milbury, who’d taken the coaching reins in Boston. Standing atop the Montreal bench, Burns hollered and gestured towards Milbury, who was just as vocal in return. The harsh words prompted the two coaches to move menacingly towards each other, but the officiating crew—and police—held them back and order was eventually restored. Boston squeaked out a 2–1 victory.

Burns reminded anyone who asked—and they all asked—that Montreal was rebuilding, a word he was antsy about using. “We can’t call it rebuilding,” he told a media scrum in mock horror. “We have to call it a transition. If I use the word ‘rebuilding’ here, they’ll hang me.” When a package arrived for him at the Forum, he gave it a leery shake, pretending to be worried about a bomb. “It’s the greatest job in hockey, but it comes with a curse. The curse is, you’ve got to win. I’m trying to make everybody understand that we won’t get 115 points this year and we might not get to the Stanley Cup final.”

There was no jovial bantering a month later, when co-captain Guy Carbonneau and defenceman Craig Ludwig were scratched for a game—suspended—after disobeying a Burns order not to leave their hotel following a crushing 5–3 loss in Boston and sneaking off to a bar. Carbonneau sucked up the punishment as just. “Even if I’m captain, the rules are there for everybody.”

The injured started trickling back, but Burns was still forced to lean heavily on his “brats,” especially on the blue line, Lefebvre and Mathieu Schneider stepping up when Chelios was felled by a stretched cruciate ligament in his left knee, for which he went under the knife in late March. Without “Cheli,” it would be a prohibitive task to catch Buffalo for second place in the Adams Division—they didn’t—much less make another run at reaching the finals. A nightmare season of injuries had taken Carbonneau, Lemieux, Bobby Smith and Brian Skrudland out of the lineup for more than a month at a time.

Back-to-back ties closed out the season, giving them 93 points overall and third place in the Adams Division, the Sabres their first-round opponent. Buffalo had twice defeated Montreal since February, when their hold on second was threatened, and were 3–0–1 against the Canadiens in the cozy confines of the Memorial Auditorium, where the series would open.

A classic Buffalo blizzard raged outside the rink on April 5 as the teams lined up for game one. Inside, the Sabres whipped up an ice storm of their
own, freezing out the visitors 4–1. High-tempo, fast-paced and bone-crunching, Buffalo punished the Habs’ battered bodies with goalie Daren Puppa prolonging his mastery of Montreal. In the trainer’s room, Chelios continued his frantic rehab regimen.

The Sabres, unwisely, crowed about their win, some speaking prematurely about a Stanley Cup final for the franchise. Montreal’s players were indignant to learn Buffalo had a cardboard Cup cut-out in the dressing room. For game two, the Aud was festooned with “Pump it up for the Stanley Cup” banners. Carbonneau sniffed: “You could see all those banners. They made the mistake of being overconfident. You have to know how to stay humble.”

Montreal humbled the Sabres, surviving an early two-man disadvantage, their confidence growing from there to surface with a 3–0 win. “Playoff hockey has a lot to do with luck, with who gets the breaks,” Burns said afterwards. “It was our turn.” It was more than merely luck. While Burns had sometimes been damned with faint praise as a coach big on motivational genius but wanting on Xs-and-Os tactics, it was his sharp penalty-killing strategy that kept Buffalo off the score sheet: setting up a passive box that frustrated Buffalo’s penchant for making pretty cross-ice passes, Burns ordered his players not to rush the puck carrier or challenge aggressively against the point. The Sabres were thrown off stride by this passive-aggressive technique.

On the morning of game three in Montreal, Burns woke up sniffing OT in the air. “We’re due for an overtime game,” he predicted, correctly. “I can smell it.” Montreal prevailed in the ultra-conservative encounter that unfolded, Brian Skrudland squeezing the winner past Puppa and the left post at 12:35 of the extra frame. Two nights later, Buffalo evened the series on Montreal ice, Pierre Turgeon notching a pair in the 4–2 victory. It was their last hurrah. Montreal edged the Sabres 3–2 in Buffalo—Burns double-shifting Richer, who scored his fifth and sixth of the playoffs—and the coach was anxious to end it back at the Forum in game six. “We don’t want to come back here for a seventh game.” Actually, neither home nor away ice seemed to please Burns, who found reason to fret over playing in
front of a keyed-up Montreal audience. “Playing at home, guys get more nervous. The fans get impatient. They want a goal right away. By doing that, the players tend to lose the team concept and start playing as individuals. Players start doing things that aren’t them. Then mistakes happen and the other team scores.” He tried to quell the rah-rah. “We can’t win a game in the first five minutes or even the first period.”