Coach: The Pat Burns Story (40 page)

He’d taken the Lou liturgy to heart. Sometimes they locked horns, but, true to his word, Lamoriello would not allow indisposition to linger. “If I had something to say, or if he was upset, he never let it go to a third party. If he didn’t like something that I did, he’d tell me and we’d try to correct it. If I didn’t like something he was doing, the same thing, eyeball to eyeball. Then leave it there. Don’t get me wrong: Pat wouldn’t take it easy with me, either. But I’d say, ‘Pat, come on.’ And he’d smile. He was stubborn, to the point where, in the past, he might not have trusted someone who told him ‘You’re wrong.’ That’s what he got better at. With the players, too, sometimes they just needed a little guidance. Pat was a person who could hurt you with the things he said. I told him, “Do you like it when someone talks to you like that?’ Or I’d go right back
at him. But from the very first day, it was total honesty between us.”

In early January 2003, the old Burns escaped from his cage when reporters noted that skilled players such as Patrik Elias, Joe Nieuwendyk and Scott Gomez were merely shadows of their former selves and blamed the coach’s static system. Burns lashed out with an obscenity-studded diatribe. “Do you think I’m telling the players not to score goals? That’s horseshit. Everybody’s job is to score goals. Do you think there’s a coach in the league who says, ‘Don’t score goals because this is a defensive system’? Wake up and smell the fucking coffee.” Opposing players who criticized New Jersey’s suffocating tendencies Burns dismissed as “crybabies.” With his own players, if wayward on the ice, Burns was unafraid of applying the benching timeout, even with his stars. He scratched Gomez from a game. Infuriated, Gomez responded by tallying points in his next five straight.

The excoriated system of airtight defence was winning games, and that’s all that mattered. By the All-Star break, the Devils hadn’t lost a game in regulation time at home for a month. Burns pummelled dominance at the Swamp into his players’ heads, said he could live with .500 on the road. In March two consecutive losses was considered a mild slump by Jersey standards. The Devils finished the regular season 46–20–10–6 with 108 points—second highest in team history—the Atlantic Division title, and seeded second in the Eastern Conference. It had been a superb year one for Burns, who admitted to being physically and emotionally drained on the cusp of playoffs. “I find it more difficult the older I get.” But he’d been on his best behaviour, lobbing only the occasional incendiary at reporters, whom he ceaselessly considered the enemy. “I like to throw a shot back once in a while … can’t bite my tongue. I just feel better. People around here think that I’m supposed to make friends. I’m not here to make friends. I’m about as bouncy as a hunk of clay.”

In the first playoff round, Jersey played Boston, and here was intrigue. Not only was this the club that had last fired Burns, but GM O’Connell, after ditching Rob Ftorek with nine games remaining in the season, had gone behind the bench himself. Against Burns, he was hopelessly
outmatched, though Burns tried to squelch that storyline. “I worked for Harry Sinden. I didn’t work for Mike O’Connell. This is not about revenge. The game isn’t being played behind the bench.”

For game one, it was exceedingly played behind the bench, Burns coping with the abrupt loss of Gomez (to whiplash) and Nieuwendyk (walloped in the back of the head by Bryan Berard). He shuffled his lines insanely, the Devils held the Bruins’ Joe Thornton—101 points in the regular season—in close check, and Jamie Langenbrunner scored both goals as the Devils won 2–1. In a scrappy game two, Langenbrunner again potted the winner, and the Devils were 4–2 victors, taking a 2–0 series lead as the action switched to the FleetCenter. Brodeur posted his fourteenth shutout in seventy career playoff games, Jersey handily dumping the Bruins 3–0. A Boston columnist opined, “The Iraqi army has a better chance of making a comeback than the Bruins do.”

The anticipated sweep was avoided when Boston chased Brodeur from the net—a rare sight—in a 5–1 thumping. Even more exceptionally irregular was the absence of Daneyko from the lineup. The veteran—Mr. New Jersey—had attended the franchise’s inaugural training camp twenty years earlier and played in 165 straight playoff games, the third-longest such streak in NHL history. Now, a fortnight from his thirty-ninth birthday, Burns had taken the gutsy step of scratching him, reasoning that Daneyko was labouring from a painful hit to the ribs from P.J. Axelsson in game three.

Daneyko was back in for game five and Jersey closed out the Bruins at the Swamp 3–0. That launched the Devils into a second-round encounter with the surprising Tampa Bay Lightning, coached by John Tortorella to the top of the Southeast Division and victorious after overcoming a 2–0 deficit against Washington in their opening series. Typically, Burns used Tampa’s admiring press as ammunition in his “the whole world is against us” mantra. “Nobody wants to see us win, except our fans. They would like to see Tampa win. ‘Hey, let’s see these guys win, they’re the Cinderella team.’ Every year, there’s a team that puts on a glass slipper and turns into Cinderella, and all of a sudden everybody falls in love with them.”

Even the home-love for Jersey was underwhelming, with thousands of empty seats at the Meadowlands for each of the first two games, which the Devils took 3–0 and 3–2. Game two was decided by Langenbrunner in the third overtime period. In Florida, the visitors erased a three-goal deficit but lost 4–3 to the Lightning on Dave Andreychuk’s winner after Burns was prevented from completing a line change that left him with four forwards on the ice. Scott Stevens left the game early, hit in the ear with a slapshot. His courageous turn in game four, wearing a plastic guard to protect his stitched-up left ear, inspired the Devils into a commanding performance. Scott scored a power-play goal, too, in the 3–1 victory—the “cherry on top,” said Brodeur.

Finally, for game five at the Meadowlands, the near-sellout crowd came to life, banging thunder-sticks throughout a marathon affair that went into triple overtime before Grant Marshall dispatched the Bolts 2–1. Marshall had actually missed the bus carrying the team from their hotel to the rink—it left fifteen minutes early—and had to literally run after it, teammates laughing as they watched out the back window. “If I’d known it was going to go three overtimes, I’d have stopped and called a cab.” Now the Devils had to contend with Ottawa, the most potent team in the league that year. Because he grew up in the region, Burns was even more of a media magnet during the Eastern Conference final. The Senators were coached by Jacques Martin, another local fellow and the man whose team had defeated Burns’s Olympiques squad in the Memorial Cup back in 1986. One paper pounced on a Burns quote that was played across the front page: “We’ll win.” This immediately evoked memories of Mark Messier famously promising a victory before the Rangers’ semifinal against Jersey in 1994, a vow fulfilled as New York went on to end a fifty-four-year Cup drought. Burns didn’t dispute the quote saying only that it was taken out of context. He’d been praising the Sens, complimenting their magnificent season. “Then I’m asked, ‘Well, the way you’re talking, you don’t have a chance to win?’ I say, ‘Oh, we’ll win.’ Of course, they blow a big headline up the top, ‘Burns promises win.’ ” He grunted. “You can’t win.”

The highly anticipated matchup opened in Ottawa’s Corel Centre,
Devils losing 3–2 in overtime, the first time they trailed a series that spring. Lamoriello took his squad back to Jersey for the day off—Mother’s Day, as it happened—before game two, which was widely mocked, some speculating the move was intended to sequester Brodeur from interrogation about his scandalizing marriage breakup. Before leaving town, Burns spent three hours visiting with his mother at the retirement home where she resided. In any event, the Devils got their split upon returning to Ottawa, an impressive 4–1 win.

Back at the Swamp, both Brodeur and Patrick Lalime were awesome in duelling goaltending displays, Jersey eking out a 1–0 decision. Burns lauded Brodeur: “Without him, where would we be? I have run out of words to say about him.” The Devils prevailed commandingly in game four, 5–2, to take a 3–1 series lead. But whoa, not so fast—Ottawa had reserves of tenacity and oodles of talent. Rookie Jason Spezza, making his postseason debut, tallied a goal and assist, lifting the Senators to a 3–1 victory in game five. It was at this point that details of Brodeur’s marital split were uncovered by the media after his estranged wife, Melanie, filed divorce papers. Her itemized complaints of adultery—dates, places—were reported, gleefully in some quarters. Brodeur had become involved with a woman (now his wife) who’d formerly been married to Melanie’s half-brother. His personal problems were grist for public taunting and tabloid sensationalism. “Pat was very supportive of me during that time,” says Brodeur. “It was so tough because here we are, in the middle of the playoffs, and there’s all this gossip flying around, everything coming out. I wasn’t distracted when I was playing. Hockey is the place you hide. The distraction was outside the game. Pat took care of me, and his wife, Line, took care of my girlfriend. It wasn’t like he told me, ‘You’ve got to do this and you should do that.’ He was just there for me. He’d been through a lot in his own personal life, so maybe he could relate. I needed people around me to help me through it. Pat just said, ‘I’m here for you.’ That was the beginning of the relationship we built outside of hockey.”

With an 11–4 record, 4 shutouts and a 1.67 GAA, Brodeur clearly had no problems between the lines. In so keenly contested a series, he had to be
better than merely awfully good. Jersey hadn’t lost two straight games in the postseason and was 8–0 at the Meadlowlands, but that streak was halted in game six, claimed 2–1 by the Senators in overtime. The series would be decided in a game seven at the Corel Centre.

Ottawa had more skill, but the Devils, arguably, had more will, and some motivational gimmickry from Burns. Hours before game time, he noticed some trailers set up outside the arena to be used by converging media should the Cup final unfold in Ottawa. This struck Burns as presumptuous and he exploited the scene to fire up his troops, stopping the team bus to direct their attention towards the offending vehicles. “You see those trailers? We’re going to send those trailers back because there is not going to be a next round!”

The Devils got on the board first, but lost Nieuwendyk early to a hip injury. Burns went into the medical room during intermission and discovered his thirty-five-year-old two-time Stanley Cup champion in tears, unable to continue playing. “I went back in the room and told the players we have a rangy old veteran on the other side who would love to help you out. He’s got a tear running down his eye right now. That seemed to pump up the team. Everybody rallied around each other.”

Up 2–1 in the third, Burns paced back and forth, smacking players on the shoulders, exhorting them to go harder. “Pat was so passionate on the bench about ‘Let’s take it to them!’ and ‘They’re on the ropes!’ ” said Brodeur afterwards. “I’ve never seen him that emotional unless he’s yelling at the referees—or Gomer [Gomez].” When Jeff Friesen’s turnover led to Ottawa’s tying goal, Burns consoled rather than flayed. Friesen responded by scoring with 2:14 left to give New Jersey the game 3–2 and the series 4–3.

The drama cranked up even further in the Cup final between Jersey and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, though many lamented the prospect of head-to-head slogging between two D-addicted teams. It would undoubtedly be a battle of nerves between two Quebec-born goalies: Brodeur and Jean-Sébastien Giguère, who’d been at least equally spectacular in the
playoffs, with a shutout streak of 213 minutes and 17 seconds. Most nerve-wracked among spectators was Carol Niedermayer, mother of Duck Rob and Devil Scott. The biggest name on either team’s manifest, however, was Burns, reminded every day that there was no Cup on his resumé. “I’m not important in this,” he maintained. “This isn’t for me. What I want is for this team.” Behind the other bench was Mike Babcock, rookie coach, in the same position where Burns had been as a baptismal boss with the Canadiens in the ’89 final against Calgary.

Well-rested Anaheim had zip offence in game one, Brodeur recording his fifth playoff shutout of ’03 and Friesen, ex-Duck, accounting for two of Jersey’s three goals. Again, Burns sat out Daneyko, as he had in four games against Ottawa. This was excruciating for the battered veteran, though he didn’t whine. Teammates appreciated Daneyko’s dismay but were also in awe of a coach who had the guts to make that call. “It’s not easy to make a move like that when you know that Dano is the face of the franchise,” says Brodeur. “Dano was not just a regular player. We’re talking about a guy who’d been in the organization forever, and the fans loved him. But it just wasn’t working, and it had to be done. We needed our best players to be in the lineup. You’ve got to tip your hat to Pat for being able to make that decision.”

For game two, the Ducks showed a soupçon more determination, but the result was exactly the same: a 3–0 loss. As the series moved to the Arrowhead Pond, Giguère pointed an accusatory finger at his teammates. “I would be very disappointed if not everybody shows up with lots of emotion. That’s what’s been lacking and that’s unacceptable. We have to play for the moment. When is the next time this is going to happen to us?”

Thus aroused, Anaheim showed the mettle that had brought them to this juncture, winning 3–2 in overtime, Brodeur giving up two soft wanderlust goals. In game four, thirty-nine-year-old Steve Thomas was the overtime hero for the Ducks in a 1–0 nail-biter. Critics clucked about a lack of goals diminishing the finals, yet this was good hockey for the discerning eye, if disastrous for the broadcasting network. Jersey unshackled its alleged gunners 6–3 at Continental Airlines Arena in a rollicking game five.
Running out of topics in their largely unsuccessful attempts to engage Burns in a to-and-fro conversation at an off-day scrum, reporters queried the coach about people he most admired. He listed Scotty Bowman, Bill Parcells, Bob Knight and General “Arnold” Schwarzkopf, mixing up his Normans and his Schwarzeneggers.