Coach: The Pat Burns Story (38 page)

The Bruins dropped the next three. Burns rallied the troops after losing the fourth game 4–1. “It was an old-fashioned ass-booting. But it’s not how you get put down on your ass. It’s how you get back up.” Boston staved off elimination with a 5–3 win in game five at the FleetCenter, then headed for a game six engagement at the Marine Midland Arena. “Order the chicken wings, because we’re coming!” With the Sabres producing their best effort of the postseason, however, there was no rejoicing over wings and beer. Buffalo prevailed 3–2 and took the series in six. Burns shook off the disappointment. By his yardstick, the team had measured up. “We played hard right to the buzzer. You have to be proud of those guys, and I am.”

Sinden wasn’t, much. On the morning after playoff expulsion, the players woke up to a newspaper broadside from Sinden. With the exception of Bourque, fumed the GM, his best Bruins hadn’t been up to the task. “The coaching staff did a great job. They tried traps, they tried forechecking, they tried everything. It was a player issue.” He singled out Jason Allison (training camp holdout) and Dmitri Khristich (arbitration) for particular denunciation, which deeply upset everyone on the team. Standing up to Sinden, Allison shot back: “It seems like it’s someone different’s fault every year. How many years has it been since we got out of the first round? What has it been, 10 different coaches and 500 different players? So, it’s my fault this time, I guess. I’ll take the blame.” Khristich snorted: “Carve everybody up. That’s how it’s done.”

Burns was not despondent—yet. But Sinden did nothing to upgrade the roster over the summer except sign Dave Andreychuk to a one-year deal. Quality guys such as Tim Taylor were allowed to flee as free agents. Boston simply walked away from Khristich’s arbitration award. Dafoe missed training camp and the first month of the 1999–2000 season, sitting at home in California while Sinden played hardball on a new contract. Consequently, the Bruins had their worst start in thirty-five years, not recording their first win until the tenth game.

The coach had a reputation for diminishing returns: year one was always marked by extraordinary enhancement; year two, a slight setback; year three, all-out regression seeps in. There it was again, the stigma: three-year coach with a four-year contract. “That was the book on Pat,” says Sinden. “They can take him for a year or two and then they tune out. I wouldn’t necessary say that was the case here. I wish we had been able to give him some better players.” Sinden argued more strenuously for an attack philosophy—livelier, pouncing, take it to them. Meanwhile, Burns struggled to cobble together some momentum, halt the losing, and the only way he saw of doing that was to reinforce defensive discipline. GM and coach were at counter-purposes. “I felt we should be a more
aggressive, attacking team and he didn’t,” says Sinden. “I remember saying to him once, ‘Pat, I’ve seen teams play a 1–2–2 or a 2–3, but you play a 0–5. That pissed him off.” Dogmatic, Burns reiterated: “This is the way I’m going to be, whether fans like it or not. What fans want is a winning team. That’s what markets a hockey club—winning.”

It was to be an
annus horribilis
, a traumatizing season for everybody, but especially for Burns and Bourque. One of them—the less likely choice—would not survive that season in Boston, would verily fling his body over the wall to escape the madness.

A dark sense of foreboding hung over the whole outfit. Burns became more vocal in emphasizing the paltry elements he’d been given to craft a team. Then he turned around and accused the players he did have of being “mopers.” “We can’t sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. Who are we to question how they’re going to spend their money? We’re not in any position to disagree. Who am I? I’m just an employee, just a number in [the] company. I’ve spoken to Mr. Jacobs twice in my life. So it’s not up to me to decide that, and it’s certainly not up to the players. You have a job to do as a professional athlete. You’re paid to go out and perform. Go out and do it. We’ve got to quit pissing and moaning about things that have happened and get to saying, ‘Hey, we have to go forward with this.’ We have to get the passion back into the game. You can’t win without emotion, and right now it’s not there.”

His emotions were close to the surface, apparent in an excessive—even for Burns—expletive-laced tirade following a loss to Ottawa. He erupted at Sinden when the GM attended a practice and made critical comments. “He was just going out on the ice, and I said something to him about the team,” Sinden remembers. “And he said, ‘Oh, you’re so out of date on this stuff,’ and kept walking. That just galled me. I hadn’t been coaching the team, but I’d watched every game for about thirty-five years. I was not out of date.”

By Burns’s reckoning, he was staying the course. He refused to push the panic button and, significantly, the players expressed confidence in him. The ship righted itself temporarily, went on an excellent 9–1–2 roll, then heaved and lurched again, pounded 9–3 by Chicago. “Let’s not get
too depressed,” Burns reasoned. “Let’s not be talking suicide.” Recklessly, he took another bite at management’s shin, via his roster. “I don’t care if the Lord is behind the bench and Moses is the GM. If our top line is not scoring, we can’t win.”

At Christmas, the doomsday chorus was
in viva voce
with rampant speculation Burns would be pink-slipped. By December 29, Boston had won just twice in thirteen games. Sinden flew to East Rutherford with the sole purpose of stifling rumours the coach was about to walk the plank. “I was as firm as I can be to make them understand that this is not going to happen,” he told reporters. The Bs lost to Jersey anyway.

Boston staggered into the new year, a sourpuss Burns sparring more frequently and caustically with journalists. The pattern was repeating: It’s not
my
fault. I can’t score goals for them. Woe is me. Then, from Buffalo, owner Jacobs twisted the dagger. “I think our team has been managed well by Harry and Mike,” he told the
Boston Globe
. “But our coaching has not been what I think it should be. I think our coaches need to do a better job. I don’t feel our fans are getting what they deserve. They should be getting better than what we’ve done.” Burns, appalled and offended, assailed on all sides, could hardly repudiate the owner. “I can understand Jeremy’s position. When you own a multimillion-dollar business, you can damn well criticize who you want.” It didn’t help matters that, after Jacobs had invited the entire team to dinner at his second home in West Palm Beach, one player was anonymously quoted in the
Boston Herald
, dripping resentment: “The guy nickel-and-dimed us, and we all get to go see how rich he is.”

Sinden gave his coach another vote of confidence. O’Connell didn’t. The players had Burns’s back, though, turning on one of their own, Joe Murphy, when the winger lambasted his coach from the bench during a game against the Senators, belching obscenities because he’d been nailed to the pine. Murphy was suspended for “insubordination” and no teammate came to his defence. There had been previous, vehement, squabbles between Murphy and Burns in the dressing room, but the coach had never before in his career been subjected to such blatant mutiny by a player. “It
had happened on the bench a couple of times,” he revealed. “I think it’s a question of respect. I think the players were having enough. I was having enough, too.” He added: “A great coach once told me, you’re a great coach when you’ve been told to F-off five times. But the sixth time, you have to do something.” Murphy was sent to no man’s land—and then to Washington.

Following another listless loss, Burns was livid, angrily kicking a door open at the FleetCenter, slamming his office door so forcefully that the dressing room rattled. He emerged only to drag players out of the exercise room, where media isn’t allowed, ordering them back to the dressing room to face the music. “Get in there right now!” he screamed.

By March, even Bourque—the most loyal, selfless of Bruins, five times a Norris Trophy winner—had reached the end of his rope with all the wackiness in the Hub. He requested a trade, preferably to Philadelphia. Sinden sent him to Colorado. His leave-taking, with a press conference at Logan Airport, the Bourque children tearfully watching Dad depart, was gut-wrenching and melancholy. The iconic captain had discussed his intentions with Burns. “Pat was always very respectful towards me,” says Bourque. “He recognized how I went about my business, how I worked out, how I practised, and how I played. I was forty then—not quite Pat’s age, but pretty close. I felt close to Pat as someone I could relate to. But that third year … it was not pretty. By then, it was a totally different team, all the character guys we’d lost. I didn’t think we had much to work with, trying to make the playoffs. For the most part, we went out there and worked hard, but it just wasn’t going to happen. Pat realized that, I realized that. I was always one to go to the rink with a big smile on my face, a guy that was positive. But it was tough to be positive anymore. Everybody realized, like I did at that point, there’s nothing here.” At the end of his last game as a Bruin, a 3–0 loss to Philly, Bourque collected the puck as a memento.
Au revoir, Ray
. (A year later, in the last game of a glorious career, Bourque and the Avalanche hoisted the Stanley Cup joyously.)

As Bourque flew westward on a private jet, Burns rued the end of an era, but advocated team reconciliation. Wrung out from all the melodrama, he urged a ceasefire with management. “I just hope the mudslinging
stops. I’ve had enough of that. I’m so tired of it—who’s at fault, what happened …” Writing about Bourque’s departure in the
Herald
, Michael Gee humorously observed: “The surprise was that Pat Burns didn’t climb onto a wheel strut before takeoff. The Bruins in 2000 are Saigon in 1975. The only sane destination is out.”

Sanity, or something slightly resembling it, was restored. Sinden wasn’t exactly bolstering his coach, however. “We haven’t given up on Pat Burns. We’ll sit down at the end of the season and we’ll evaluate our situation.” Media buzzards were circling, scenting carrion. In fact, Sinden was ready to drop the guillotine as the countdown began towards mathematical elimination from the postseason. And then he hesitated—a cynic might say from abhorrence of having to shell out Burns’s guaranteed severance. Burns, sadomasochistic maybe, made it clear he wanted to come back the next year. Faced with widespread pushback—from reporters, from fans, from season-ticket holders—Sinden relented and stayed his hand.

“We had conversations about things changing, and I was satisfied,” he says. “But things didn’t change.” Burns had promised to eschew his suffocating trap style, allow for more creativity, be mindful of Sinden’s directives. When the season rolled around, though, the Bruins were just as static as ever, despite a couple of wins to start. Burns’s respite from termination lasted for all of eight games. A dismal road trip wrote the epitaph to his tenure as a Bruin. Boarding the return flight to Boston, he was heard softly singing, “Leavin’ on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again …”

Sinden pulled the plug on October 25, 2000. “We were losing and we were not entertaining. We were playing the same old way. Pat was still doing it his own way, always his own way. Mike O’Connell was the guy really pushing for it. He felt we had to make a change.”

His third year in Boston, amidst the initial flurry of firing rumours, Burns had defied convention and purchased a property—a horse ranch, minus the ponies. The spread was actually situated in New Hampshire, which made him an out-of-state-coach, though he maintained a pied-à-terre
in Boston. Now he was an out-of-work coach, but he and Line didn’t sell the home. They loved the house, the secluded location. In the nearby town of Laconia, Burns held court with the media a few days after being axed, at Patrick’s Pub, natch. By then, he had the script down pat. The firing phone call, he related with a chortle, had come at 7 a.m. “That’s an early time of day to be fired.”

Without acrimony, apparently devoid of anger, Burns laid out his case: he did try to adapt, he wasn’t a one-dimensional coach and he had heeded Sinden. “Harry’s an original.” And no, of course he was not done coaching yet. “I’m just a simple guy, trying to get through life. I want to go down the road with as few problems as I can. This is just a bump in that road.”

The evening before, Burns had watched the Bruins on TV beating the Washington Capitals 4–1. They were coached by his good pal Mike Keenan, a handy hire for Sinden because Iron Mike lived in Boston. Burns insisted that Keenan stepping into his shoes would not affect their friendship. Cousin Robin Burns says different. “He was hurt.”

A week later, Sinden fired himself as general manager, bowing out to his protégé O’Connell, but keeping his president title. He was still, in effect, the boss. By the spring of 2012, O’Connell was long gone and Sinden still had an executive office as “senior advisor to the owner of the Boston Bruins.” Reminiscing about the banishment of Burns, there’s a hint of regret in his voice.

“I’ve got to say, there was probably some compulsion on my part. Sometimes, you make these moves compulsively, and when you look back, you think maybe you should have given it more time. You question yourself afterwards. That might have been the case with Pat. But we gave him a good shot.”

Mike Keenan was released at the end of the 2000–01 season.

P
AT
B
URNS PICKED UP
Lou Lamoriello at the airport in his truck, brought the wily hockey sage back to his horseless ranch in New Hampshire, and introduced him to wife Line and pet boxer Roxie. That warm June afternoon, they spent three hours on the front porch, talking.

It doesn’t take long in hockey to become yesterday’s man. The coaching merry-go-round routinely discards passengers deemed to have taken one spin too many. Predominant styles alter, assets become liabilities, what was new gets old. As with athletes, those coming up through the ranks push out those suspected of being on a downward trajectory. The game, impatient, never stands still. Hubris is visited upon the ego-driven. Stanley Cup rings are no guarantee of future employment, and Burns didn’t own such bling anyway. The nakedness of his fingers was not necessarily due to a quirk of fate. Of all his teams, in three Original Six cities, only one had persevered into a Cup final. In a thirty-club NHL, regular-season winning percentage equated to no more than a false positive—just another also-ran.