Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  Roy’s aura of invincibility ended a few nights later. Facing Philadelphia in the conference final, Roy was riding the crest of a gaudy 30–0–4 record at home. On a pair of shorthanded Flyers goals, pffft, the streak was kaput, the spell broken. On May Day, Philadelphia triumphed 3–1. “All good things come to an end,” Roy shrugged. It had been extensively commented on, in that day’s papers, that Roy had never defeated the Flyers in his career. Burns used that as a launching pad. “How’d you like it if the paper put on the front page that you’ve never written a good story?” he snapped at a reporter at his press conference. After practice the next morning, Burns was in a sour frame of mind. “We’ve been favoured since day one of the playoffs. I’m glad we’re not for the next game, because they won the first game. We’re in another category now, and if everyone isn’t prepared to pay the price, we’ll lose again. We’d have to be scared going to Philadelphia down two games. Now it’s up to us to catch them.”

  It was just one game, one loss, for criminy’s sake. In game two, Roy bounced back and Philly was blanked 3–0. Burns pulled out the clichés in continuing his woe-is-us rhetoric. “We played the way we always do when our backs are to the wall.” The game was distinguished—or undistinguished—by a melee that broke out before the puck was dropped, during the warmup. Philadelphia had their nose out of joint over the elbow Chris Chelios had laid on Brian Propp in the previous game, which sent the Flyer to hospital. It all revived memories of the conference final between these two clubs two years earlier, in which a brawl erupted before the national anthems were sung, players from both teams returning from the dressing room to slug it out.

  Montreal, by now a highly efficient team functioning at its best, poised and confident, tossed Philadelphia aside 5–1 in Game 3 at the Spectrum. Burns had given his players a day off in the City of Brotherly Love in between, and a batch of them went to Atlantic City for a bit of gambling. Roy shut out the Flyers 3–0 again in game four, and Philadelphia assistant coach Mike Eaves marvelled: “They are all on the same wavelength, both mentally and physically. It’s so unselfish, it’s almost utopian. They are a chain without a weak link.” Spectrum fans, less gracious, hurled beer cans at the Habs as they left the ice, scoring bull’s-eyes on Burns and his assistant, Jacques Laperrière.

  The Flyers avoided elimination in game five on the road, Dave Poulin settling matters 2–1 in overtime. “We didn’t play our style,” Burns fulminated. “We’ve been reading how great we are for three games, and all the flowers the Flyers were throwing at us, and we just gobbled it up. We thought it was going to be easy.”

  It wasn’t that hard, in fact, as the Canadiens—playing methodical and conservative hockey—prevailed 4–2 in game six. The Flyers lost their marbles in the closing minutes, seeking vengeance if nothing else, with goaltender Ron Hextall leaving his net to take a wallop at Chelios, then throwing his blocker and mask at the Canadien for good measure. He received a five-minute match penalty for intent to injure. Only Roy stayed out of the donnybrook that ensued, though Burns kept the players who were on the bench off the ice. Chelios laughed off the mugging. He, and the Habs, were done with Philly, and that’s all that counted.

  Calgary awaited, having enjoyed a less trying route to the Stanley Cup finals. While the Flames had been stretched by Vancouver to seven games in the first round, they’d then dispatched Los Angeles in four and Chicago in five. They were home and cooled out. Unlike Montreal, they also had marquee stars, including a guy by the name of Doug Gilmour and recent rookie-of-the-year Joe Nieuwendyk. The Canadiens had no scorer who’d reached the thirty-five-goal threshold in the regular season and only eight who had nineteen or more. But they had ascended on a solid team concept, with Burns—who’d proved himself an excellent motivator and more than adequate tactician—insisting he was not the preeminent factor.

  The Canadiens arrived in Cow Town toting cylinders of oxygen—Burns’s idea. “This first game is going to be a hummer because of the altitude problem. I brought a junior team to the Memorial Cup in Portland in 1986, and we brought oxygen and it helped.” For Montreal, a club that traced its heritage back to 1909, predating the NHL, it was a thirty-first appearance in the Cup final; Calgary, an expansion outfit transplanted from Atlanta, had been there only once before, losing to the Canadiens. “Calgary’s built up a hell of a head of steam, it seems to me,” Burns demurred.

  Game one went 3–2 the Flames’ way, Theoren Fleury’s second-period goal standing up as the winner. In game two at the Saddledome, the Habs burst out of the gate, built up a 2–0 lead, then watched it dissolve as Calgary rebounded to tie. In the dressing room between the second and third periods, Chelios was on his feet, rallying his teammates. “He stood up in the room and said there was no way we were going to lose this game,” said Burns. At 8:01, practising what he preached, Chelios silenced the crowd with a blazing forty-five-foot slapshot that handcuffed Mike Vernon. Russ Courtnall added insurance and, with a 4–2 result, the Canadiens earned a split, removing Calgary’s home-ice advantage. “Pat was upset with us after the second period,” said Chelios. “We had no flow and we didn’t play with discipline. We needed a kick in the butt.”

  Game three at the Forum was a marathon. Tied 3–3 by Mats Naslund’s lob with just forty-one seconds left in the third, Roy pulled for an extra attacker, the teams then battled through more than thirty-eight minutes of extra time before Ryan Walter sent the fan faithful celebrating into the night. He stuffed Richer’s pass behind Mike Vernon, the netminder widely and prematurely perceived as Calgary’s Achilles heel. To a crush of reporters, Walter struggled valiantly to express his feelings in both official languages: “J’étais numb!” About Larry Robinson wrapping him in a bear hug after the goal: “Larry Robinson squeezed moi!” Burns credited “all those tough practices they complain about.” No one could know it would be Montreal’s last hurrah.

  Calgary knotted the series at two apiece in game four. Gilmour and Joe Mullen propelled the Flames to a 2–0 lead, and this time there was no gallant comeback, Montreal falling 4–2. The sense of inevitability, of Habs destiny, was dissipating. At the Saddledome for game five, the temperature at ice level hit thirty degrees Celsius, and it was Montreal in a nervous sweat after absorbing a 3–2 loss. “It’s the game we had to win, no doubt about it,” an exhausted Burns conceded. They’d not lost two games in a row since January. The Habs still had the Forum factor to inspire—Montreal had never lost a Cup at home.

  Montreal was the more spent team, however. “We were a very tired team when the playoffs rolled around,” says Roy. “We’d been on the ice practically every day.” And in the final, Burns may have made a tactical error. “We were equally good, if not better than Calgary,” says Russ Courtnall. “But we were tired. And the reason we were tired is that we’d flown back from Calgary after the first two games on a red-eye. We didn’t sleep. After game four, we flew directly back to Calgary. Meanwhile, Calgary slept in Montreal and flew back the next day. After game five, again, we flew red-eye back to Montreal. Calgary didn’t. We were exhausted. You can imagine, flying back and forth, three red-eyes in one week, and trying to play to the best of your abilities every night. Pat mentioned to Larry Robinson later that he just didn’t know any better. He was a young coach and it was a rookie mistake and he would never make it again.”

  Bob Gainey is unconvinced that fatigue was a determining factor. “We’d got behind in the series, lost a game at home, and were playing catch-up. We can hand this over to the guys who work from ten till one in the morning on the panels, and they’ll figure out something we should have done different. But honest to God, I don’t think there was anything dramatic, tactically, to blame.”

  Interestingly, Lemieux suggests maybe the Canadiens had drifted away from their team concept when it mattered most. Several veterans knew they would likely not be back next season, and perhaps rifts that had seemed patched over began to rip open again. “There was a lot of friction building up. I could feel it between the younger
and older players. I think people felt that in ’86 the older guys kind of ran the show behind the scenes, to a certain extent. Then, in ’89, Pat was making sure he was running the show. He wanted to make it his deal, and with good reason. As a coach, that’s what you want. I knew in my mind I would be gone. Other guys, like Larry [Robinson], most likely felt the same way.” The early-season schism, Lemieux says, had not genuinely been resolved. “It was put aside, maybe. But Pat would make comments like, ‘We’ve got older guys here who think they can run the show, but I’m running the show, I’m the coach, blah-blah-blah.’ He was a young coach on the biggest stage in the world, surrounded by Hall of Fame-to-be players. Whew, tough job.”

  Tough, excruciating, would be watching Calgary’s interim captain Lanny McDonald skating around the Forum ice, holding the Stanley Cup aloft. The walrus-moustached veteran hadn’t dressed for game five. But rookie coach Terry Crisp had an inkling and reached out for the stimulating jolt McDonald would undoubtedly bring to game six. His goal, giving the Flames a 2–1 lead in the second period, stood up as the winner, Calgary triumphing 4–1, Gilmour contributing a pair, including one into the empty net. Fans in Montreal had the courtesy to applaud the enemy with seconds ticking down on the ’89 finals.

  Some Montreal players wept as they looked on, crushed but still proud of what they’d accomplished. “We don’t have to apologize to the Richard brothers or Jean Béliveau,” said Bobby Smith. “We gave it all we had.”

  “They raised the Cup in our rink, and that killed Pat,” says Shayne Corson. “I know it killed us as players.”

  Burns was gracious: “They deserve what they got. It was a lot like the regular season, where we came up just a little bit short.”

  “We were so close,” says Lemieux, who scored that lone Montreal goal. “Thinking back, maybe Calgary should have beaten us in ’86 and we should have beaten them in ’89. I think we were better in ’89 than they were, and they were probably better than us in ’86. I watched Lanny McDonald with the Cup and I thought, ‘Maybe things do happen for a reason.’ ” For captain Bob Gainey, there would be no more Cups as a player; he retired that summer. “It was my final year, and it’s one that has a very satisfying, lingering taste.”

  Six weeks into that season for Les Glorieux, assailed on all sides and worried that he wouldn’t last until Christmas, Burns had quipped: “I don’t want to be coach of the year. I want to be coach for a year.” On June 8, a year to the day after he was formally handed the whistle as Montreal’s rookie bench boss, Burns won the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year.

  Chapter Seven

  Lost in Transition

  “If I use the word ‘rebuilding’ here, they’ll hang me.”

  HOCKEY IS RIFE with the sophomore jinx. This is particularly true for those who were streaking meteors the year before. From heady heights, many are pulled down by NHL gravity. Pucks don’t go in, stats take a nosedive and reality bites hard. It’s almost expected that phenom-rookie plus one equals backsliding, and nobody is surprised when it occurs, except maybe the bewildered player. But Pat Burns wasn’t a player and, while few reckoned Montreal would unspool a dream season to match that of 1988–89, when just about everything went extraordinarily right, little slack would be afforded the second-year coach.

  Montreal was a profoundly altered team, however. Bob Gainey had retired, gone off to France, of all places, to coach an obscure club outside Paris, and Larry Robinson had defected to Los Angeles as a free agent, unable to agree on terms with GM Serge Savard in a messy contract dispute. Sturdy defenceman Rick Green had hung ’em up as well.

  Burns was given job security September 1 with a four-year contract, the longest guaranteed deal granted a Montreal coach in memory. The leadership void in the dressing room was filled by Guy Carbonneau and Chris Chelios, appointed co-captains when a vote among teammates came in tied 9–9, quite possibly dividing along English and French lines. “Now you C it, now you don’t,” was the joke in town, as Carbonneau and Chelios considered wearing the C on alternating nights. Chelios had won the Norris Trophy in June, Carbonneau his second straight Selke.

  “I’m sure there are some guys who know they’ll have to talk a little louder in the dressing room,” Burns observed as the players assembled at training camp. “I don’t have to pick them out. I don’t think much building has to be done with this club. There’s a good foundation. We’ve lost veterans, so some kids will have to come in and take their places. But I liked the image of the team last year. We just have to keep it up to the same standards.”

  To say their roster resembled the Sherbrooke Canadiens more than the parent club would be stretching it. But a complement of greenhorns and just-slightly-worn cohorts were going to be blessed with big playing minutes. “I have to spend more time with them,” said Burns. “You just can’t take a kid and say, ‘You’re going to be like Larry Robinson or Bob Gainey or Rick Green.’ You have to be very patient.”

  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.’ ”