Coach: The Pat Burns Story (16 page)

And Montreal did start sluggishly, but there was no real doubt about the outcome from then on, as the home side emerged 5–2 victors, taking the first round in six. Montreal had proved too opportunistic, too experienced and too quick for the Sabres to handle. The grinding goaltenders’ duel was not particularly entertaining hockey, and Burns made no apologies for that, though Claude Lemieux did. “I know sometimes we’re not a pretty team to watch. I know people pay good money to see us put on a show, but we’re not here to do that—we’re here to win.”

Inside their dressing room, the Habs celebrated in reserved fashion. They’d been the underdogs against Buffalo—Burns’s preferred status—because the Sabres had the better season. But few truly expected the Queen City to emerge triumphant when tossed into the playoff bell jar against a club with Montreal’s history. For the seventh consecutive season, Buffalo had lost in the first round.

In New England, Boston had weathered seven-game fits with Hartford en route to what was expected to be yet another titanic showdown with historical nemesis Montreal in the Adams Division final. There was no time to savour the triumph. Said first-year coach Mike Milbury following his team’s game seven thriller: “A series win over Hartford deserves more than a Budweiser, a baloney sandwich and five hours of sleep.” Burns professed to have preferred Boston as a playoff dance partner over Hartford: “Montreal versus Boston is the series all of Canada wants to see. I would have been a bit worried if we’d played Hartford. I know the guys will have no trouble getting up for Boston—the feeling is completely different in the dressing room when we play the Bruins.” That history gave Boston GM Harry Sinden agita. “I’m tired of losing to them every spring.” Montreal, of course, had eliminated the Bs in five of the last six seasons and were 21–3
overall in playoff series against them. Despite their edge in season play, the Bruins were yet again staring down a playoff barrel, seeing red-white-and-blue jerseys stampeding their way.

Montreal got an emotional—and lineup—boost when Chris Chelios, who’d missed the final twenty-one regular-season games and the Buffalo series, was pronounced fit to resume his hockey labours. Didn’t make a lick of difference as the Bruins outdefended the defence-first Canadiens with a crisp, pristine, 1–0 win behind Andy Moog’s stellar goaltending. For game two, sniper Stéphane Richer also returned from a twisted ankle and scored two. But in the oppressive heat of the Boston Garden, the Bruins rallied from four one-goal deficits, Cam Neely’s second of the night with 1:49 left in regulation time sending it into overtime and Garry Galley scoring the 5–4 winner. Suddenly, the Bruins had a stunning 2–0 lead in the series. When the Canadiens were then rudely smacked around 6–3 back at the Forum, Patrick Roy chased from the net, they found themselves in the mortifying position of becoming the first Montreal squad in thirty-eight years to bow out in a straight set. Fans had emptied the Forum with seven minutes left. “It was hard, very hard, but he understood,” said Burns of yanking Roy. “I can tell you right now, Patrick Roy is going back in.”

The Montreal machine was unravelling like a ball of string, and tempers were fraying. Burns tried to strike a reasonable tone at first, pointing out Boston had finished eight points ahead of Montreal in the regular season and the Habs had been hard pressed to get past the Sabres. “People didn’t give us a chance in hell of beating Buffalo. And when we did, everyone gave us the Cup. We know that’s not true.”

Reporters, retroactively, studied the entrails of the season, seeking indicators for this precipitous downfall. The obvious chink was Montreal’s pitiful power play, but that was too banal an explanation for many. There were rumours of dissension in the ranks, a tendency towards cliques cool to each other, in defiance of Burns’s all-for-one doctrine. Some traced the friction all the way back to the split-vote over the captaincy. One loss away from elimination, Burns was clearly in a state of shock, looking and behaving like a man carrying the woes of the world on his shoulders, his
voice strained by inflamed tonsils. In the crisis, he became once more the focus of attention, with answers demanded. At practice, Burns and Lemieux got into a heated exchange within earshot of reporters, and cameras caught the red-faced coach brandishing a stick right under his insolent player’s chin. Lemieux grumbled: “I know what’s wrong with our power play, and I’m not a genius.”

“BOSTON BROOMS!” shrieked gleeful headlines in Beantown, anticipating the sweep, which no B-team had ever accomplished in a seven-game series with Montreal. In desperation, and with no small amount of smirking from his French-Canadian critics in the media, Burns pulled Stéphan Lebeau out of street clothes for game four. The fan-favourite rookie, with fifteen goals on the season, hadn’t played in three weeks, and Burns had heard an earful, though the insertion had more to do with an ankle injury that sidelined Richer.

Lebeau’s playoff debut was memorable. In fairy-tale fashion, he broke a 1–1 third-period tie with his first NHL postseason goal, finishing off a play he’d started, and then stuffing a wraparound past Moog for his second of the night, giving Montreal the only two-goal lead it had enjoyed in the series. Coupled with a tough-as-rawhide effort from Carbonneau, who contributed two goals, the Canadiens staved off elimination 4–1. Montreal played with an intensity bordering on anger.

“Lebeau made a big difference,” said Burns. “With the injuries we’ve had all year, we’ve had to look for different people to step up and help us find a way to win. And tonight we found Stéphan just in time.”

The kid was over the moon. “I’ve tried to keep a positive attitude. I didn’t play much at the end of the regular season, but I kept ready in practice just in case there was an injury and I would be needed. And tonight was the night. I was on the puck all night long and it kept coming to me. I felt good in the warmup and confident that I could help. We’re still in this thing, and anything can happen.”

A reporter approached Milbury afterwards, wondering why the Bruins always lost to Montreal when it counted. Smiling warmly, Milbury responded, “Fuck you.”

Before the game, Lebeau had warned that he was no saviour. But a French paper the next day trumpeted his impact as “LEBEAU: LE SAUVEUR!” The team was already in Boston by then, where Burns vainly tried to justify his scarce use of Lebeau by claiming he’d simply hoped to nurture him slowly. “I’m sure this morning in Montreal I look like a dummy.”

Lebeau had almost singlehandedly averted the sweep. “How sweep it wasn’t,” mourned a Boston columnist. And in game five, Lebeau looked primed to do it again, notching the 1–1 equalizer with thirty-three seconds remaining in the second period. But there’d be no miracle. Boston pulled ahead, and a Cam Neely empty-netter sealed Montreal’s fate, 3–1. Bounced in five.

If the guillotine were still in use, Forum faithful would have been screaming for heads to roll. In fact, the Canadiens had been in over their heads, Boston too strong an opponent, palpably the better team. Montreal finished the series 1-for-22 on the power play, 2-for-51 in the playoffs; that was the main problem. Carbonneau, it was revealed, had been playing with a cracked bone in his wrist. And Chelios would go under the scalpel again for a hernia operation. As a coach, Burns had shrunk to mortal dimensions, but the failures were not laid primarily at his doorstep—not yet.

Of course, this being Montreal, there was no real off-season. GM Savard, who’d taken intense heat from local media for not making late-season trades to strengthen his team as the playoffs approached, said the organization would “take a long, serious look at our hockey club,” indicating changes would be made.

Chelios was among those hoping there would be no shakeup. Then he became, dramatically, the first big name to depart. He learned about his trade to Chicago in a one-minute phone call from Savard, who was at the AHL meetings in Bermuda. The swap for native Montrealer Denis Savard—hometown boys trading places—had been in the works, allegedly, for about a week when announced in early July. But it seemed more than coincidence that Savard pulled the trigger within twenty-four hours of
discovering that Chelios and close buddy Gary Suter had been arrested following a punch-up outside a bar in Madison, Wisconsin.

According to the criminal complaint, the players had fought with two police officers, Chelios struggling with the cops when they tried to arrest him for urinating in public. Chelios was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, a misdemeanour. It was not his first brush with law enforcement in the state where he lived during the off-season. In 1984, Chelios was convicted of escaping from police who were taking him to a Madison hospital for an alcohol test after he’d been arrested for driving under the influence. He pleaded no contest to the escape and paid a fine, but was never charged with drunk driving. The policemen involved in the new incident sued both players, claiming to having been “assaulted, battered, abused and ridiculed.” At his arraignment, Chelios entered a not guilty plea.

In any event, Serge Savard had reached the end of his rope with Chelios. And the player professed to be pleased with the trade. “I’m really happy that I’m coming home. It was so unexpected.” All these years on, Chelios admits the abrupt exit from Montreal shook him severely. “It hit me out of nowhere when I was traded, to be honest.” But his biggest regret was not having been a better captain for Burns. “You’re supposed to be the go-between guy with the coach and the players. I had a really tough time and struggled with that. I still think to this day that I failed as a captain in Montreal. I wasn’t ready for the role. And I think Pat, being a young coach in the NHL at that time, didn’t know how to handle that, either—what my role was, what my relationship with him should be. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t understand. I’d had guys like Bob Gainey who showed me, taught me, what it took to be a team guy. You needed a captain like Gainey, who was level-headed, didn’t get too up or too down. And that wasn’t me at that point in my career, at my age. I didn’t help the situation one bit when I was in Montreal. When I got traded, I thought I was just starting to figure it out and was ready to accept the responsibility. But at that point, we’d lost, and someone had to pay and I was the guy that year.” After the trade, Burns invited Chelios to his cottage in the Eastern Townships. “We
spent a couple of days there and talked about everything, what I would have done differently. But it was too late …”

A month later, it was Claude Lemieux, the thorn in Burns’s side, out the door, dispatched to New Jersey for Sylvain Turgeon after failing to join the team when it jetted off to training camp in distant Moscow, an ill-advised NHL goodwill experiment. Serge Savard had brought player and coach together for one final stab at resolving their conflict, but no joy. Recalls Lemieux: “I told Pat, ‘I like you.’ And he said, ‘I like you too.’ I said, ‘But you don’t play me.’ He said, ‘I play you as much as I think you should play.’ I told Serge, ‘You’re going to have to trade me.’ I know he didn’t want to, but Serge promised me after that meeting he’d trade me by training camp. Serge was an honourable man. He was trying to do what was right for the team.”

Burns maintained their spats had been exaggerated by the media and he was not the impetus behind the trade. “Claude didn’t want to leave because of me. I talked to him and wished him luck.”

He was being disingenuous, as Savard confirms. “He had a real tough time with Claude Lemieux. I had to get rid of Claude because those two could not reconcile. That’s something Pat should have been able to do. But he was very stubborn. He would not change his mind. It was like he couldn’t recover. As a manager, you have the choice to get rid of a player or the coach. Obviously, in this case it was the player who went. It turned out to be a terrible mistake for us, a very bad trade for us. Turgeon turned out to be a bad player.

“Claude was pretty tough with Pat, too. It came to a point where, you don’t connect, you don’t listen. Pat wanted no part of him. That’s one side of Pat that could have improved, and did improve later. But Pat was a guy who was always right and you couldn’t change his mind.”

A
RINGING PHONE
in his hotel room woke Pat Burns in the middle of the night. Three of his players were in jail. Did he wish to bail them out?

The Canadiens had arrived in chilly Winnipeg two days early for a December game in 1990. Apart from practice, they had a lot of idle time on their hands. Most of the players went out on the first evening to a bar called the Marble Club. By closing time, only three remained: Shayne Corson, Mike Keane and Brian Skrudland. They were just leaving, had stepped through the door, when Corson noticed that a young woman was being smacked around by her male companion. With two sisters of his own, Corson was outraged by the spectacle of a female being abused. He told the man to knock it off. Harsh words were exchanged. Suddenly, someone else struck Corson over the head from behind with a cane. Keane made to grab this second man and was himself whipped across the forehead with the same cane. Skrudland, just emerging into the night air, saw both teammates covered in blood and thought for a moment they’d been shot. Coming to their defence, he too joined the fray, which had now turned into a full rumble. Police were called, and all the participants were handcuffed and thrown in the slammer.

“We spent the night together, in the same cell, wearing prison jumpsuits they gave us,” Corson remembers. “Keaner and I were pretty young at the time. It was scary. And there were other guys in the cell too, pretty tough guys. We sat on a bench together, the three of us, side by side, and didn’t speak. Skrudland kept saying, ‘Don’t speak, don’t say a word, just sit and shut up.’ We didn’t want anybody to know who we were, but they recognized us and then they started talking to us, even asking for autographs. So that made us feel a little more comfortable, but we were still scared.”