The elder statesman on the team was Foligno, at age thirty-two. He was also the resident jokester, spiritual focal point and social convener. Once, years earlier during a preseason game in Kitchener that was held up by lighting problems, Foligno soothed the restless fans by crooning Italian love songs over the PA system. But he checked into camp on September 11, 1992, after months and months of painstakingly rehabbing a leg that had been shattered in two places below the knee just before the previous Christmas, unsure whether the limb would hold up to the rigours of a fourteenth NHL season. “Pat pulled me aside and said, ‘Look, I want you to be part of this thing. You’ve worked your butt off to get back here. Just take whatever time you need and know that I want you on my team.’ So that was a real boost of confidence for me.”
Upwards of seventy players reported for day one of training camp, with only a few guaranteed jobs. “I remember the first meeting that we had,” says Foligno. “Sometimes that first meeting is the one that sets the tone for the relationship between coach and players. We were all wondering about Pat’s thought process, what his expectations were. So we had this meeting, the introductions made, and at the end he kicked everybody out except the guys who’d played on the team the year before. He told us we had jobs if we wanted them—that they were our jobs to earn, but also to lose. He said there were a lot of young players at camp, but he wasn’t going to give a kid a job just for the sake of making a change. If we came in with the right attitude, the right work ethic and dedication, and showed leadership qualities and also the sportsmanship qualities that he wanted, he would give us the opportunity. After that meeting, we all said, ‘You know what? This guy’s genuine.’ He wanted to move forward with a veteran team if he could, because that would be a more smooth transition for any coach.”
On the second day of camp, Burns blew a gasket. Partway through the morning session, the coach decided he’d seen enough, storming down from his perch high in the stands and ordering a halt. He gave the twenty-two players on the ice a thirty-second tongue-lashing before returning to his seat. Burns hadn’t liked the low tempo he’d just observed. “The attitude was, ‘Let’s get this over with and punch the clock.’ I wasn’t going to put up with that. I don’t want to whip players, but I’ll do it if I have to.”
Sylvain Lefebvre, who’d signed with Toronto as a free agent over the summer, chuckled. This was the Burns he knew and mostly loved from Montreal. “If you don’t work, it really ticks him off. He likes practices at a high tempo. You never stop. He doesn’t keep you out there for two hours every day, but you learn to come to practice and work full out, not just float.”
Veteran Leafs, some of whom had endured the screeching antics of John Brophy, another hothead coach, were unaccustomed to such a pace. “They’ve got to have it drilled into their minds that we want to be better every day,” Burns explained. “Better tomorrow, better the next day, better the day after that.” And by the way, how do you like me so far?
As per usual, reporters were lapping it up. When Burns actually laced up his skates and took to the ice with his players, he kept up a constant barrage of cussing yips and yelps during drills. “If you miss the net, I’ll just [expletive deleted]. There’s no excuse for missing the net.” Addressing the goalies before a rapid-fire shooting drill: “If you [expletive deleted] up, it will be really scary.” To all: “If you miss a pass in practice this season, it’s going to be five or ten pushups. If you [expletive deleted] all season, your pipes [arms] will be out to here.”
Go hard! he bellowed. As in Montreal, it drove Burns batty if players failed to assemble quickly in a circle when he blew the whistle for a tutorial. Last man into the scrum, if not hopping to it, was required to do two laps of the ice full out. Poor Martin Prochazka, a Czech forward, didn’t understand English. Last to fall in, Burns sent him for laps. When it happened a second time—two more laps—Prochazka just stood there, staring blankly, not grasping why the coach was picking on him. Finally, another player spoke up, telling Burns Prochazka didn’t speak the lingo. “Oh.”
Toronto had a decent set of exhibition game results—3–2–2—which, of course, presage absolutely nothing. When the team headed to a Collingwood, Ontario, resort for a bit of preseason bonding, Burns expounded on the culture of losing that had become fatally ingrained with the club, as well as his aversion to laziness. “The work ethic is one area where guys were taking shortcuts and getting away with it. I’ve told these guys that taking shortcuts may save you some energy now, but you’ll pay for it during the games. I’m talking about getting back in your own end quickly and cheating in drills by not following them to completion. If you do that, you’ll cheat in a game, too, and that costs everybody.”
In Toronto, at that time, the Leafs had also slipped behind the Blue Jays as the most adored local sports franchise. The Jays, drawing four million fans to the ballpark that season, were about to win their first World Series. It was baseball, baseball, baseball around town. The Leafs wisely moved the date of their season opener to avoid a direct conflict with a Blue Jays playoff game.
The race to respectability began October 6. “I think we’ll be exciting,” said Burns. “Our big concern will be goal scoring. But I think that’s a concern for most coaches. I think we’ll know more after ten games or so.” Looking ahead, he mused: “There are going to be peaks and valleys in any season. But if we can come out of the gate strong and get a few wins, we can get through the valleys and not be biting our nails for a playoff spot at the end.”
The Gardens was spruced up with a fresh coat of paint for opening night, cheerful banners hung from the ceiling in the corridors, new uniforms worn by the concession staff, a laser show—very ’80s, but hip by franchise standards—heralding the season’s onset. Blue Jays Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar, sitting in fourth-row golds, were greeted with even louder cheers than the players when starting-lineup introductions were made.
Burns’s well-established preference for mind-numbing, check-to-a-standstill defensive hockey had elicited some sour notes in Toronto, along with alerts that the Leafs would be drained of all entertainment quotients. The coach countered that fans would probably take dull hockey over losing hockey any night, because winning is never boring. The Leafs just didn’t have the horses for firewagon hockey anyway. Meanwhile, back in Montreal, Burns’s successor Jacques Demers had been promising “creative” hockey, a clear shot across his predecessor’s bow. That rebuke ticked off Burns, and the chip on his shoulder about Demers would never quite disappear—even when, years in the future, Canadian Senator Demers fought ceaselessly to get Burns into the Hockey Hall of Fame while he was still alive to savour the honour.
Game one of the 1992–93 season was no defensive gem, however, and assuredly not dull. Leafs showed pluck against the Washington Capitals, a team thirty-one points better than Toronto in the standings the previous year, twice tying the score but ultimately falling 6–5. Yet they’d shown determination and liveliness and, yes, entertaining hockey. The fans were delighted, but the coach was not similarly impressed. “We’re not the type of club that can get into a pissing match with a skunk. We don’t have the firepower to do that. If we do get five goals, we should win.”
As remedial instruction, a testy Burns put the team through merciless “hamburger drills” in the days that followed in preparation for a western road swing. At the Saddledome on October 10, he deployed a twenty-one-year-old rookie netminder, Félix Potvin, instead of his veteran ace, Grant Fuhr. Potvin, jittery, immediately surrendered three goals. After the first period, Burns delivered an angry lecture in the locker room, upset that his players were allowing the Flames to run roughshod over them. “Our guys had their heads so far up their you-know-whats they were coming out their noses. I can’t sit and watch that. It makes my stomach turn. I was vocal. Let’s just say everybody was listening.” Leafs, attentive, fought back gamely and lost 3–2. “There are going to be threats and they are going to be carried out,” Burns told reporters. “I won’t be em
barrassed in the first period like that again. Some guys didn’t compete, and I’m starting to find out who they are. I guarantee that we’ll have a lineup that will compete every night.” True to his word, Burns remodelled the lineup in the following game at Edmonton, with five new faces. Yet again, Toronto trailed 3–0, but this time they showed gumption in a comeback 3–3 tie.
Between-period lashings were quickly becoming a fixture. Burns unloaded again when the Leafs trailed lowly Tampa Bay, and his tirade sparked a trio of third-period goals, giving Toronto its first win of the season, 5–3. But he remained perplexed that his canon wasn’t sinking in. “I just don’t understand. This has nothing to do with systems. It has to come from the heart and the brain.” To a journalist, he offered an exposition on the reality of coaching. “It’s not as glamorous as people think. When the team wins, the players get the credit. But when the team loses, it’s the coach. How many times have you seen somebody wearing a hockey sweater with the coach’s name on the back?”
Toronto beat Norris Division rival Chicago, and that improved his disposition, marginally. But a 5–1 routing by Minnesota had him apoplectic. So puny was Toronto’s power play that he even dispatched Gilmour to the point. “I was ready to go out there myself with my booming shot,” Burns said, sarcastically.
Next morning, he tried blowing off steam by jogging to the Gardens. He was living in a spacious waterfront condo near Harbourfront with girlfriend Tina Sheldon. They’d met in Montreal when Burns had been corralled as celebrity shill for a line of pre-packaged weight-loss meals. He hated the food—it made him violently ill—but he liked the marketing lady who’d landed him for the account. Tina was a dark-haired, blue-eyed dazzler—and married. She separated from her husband and quit her job to accompany Burns to Toronto, and the couple happily set up house. “She set her cap for him,” says the man who’d made the original introductions. And Burns was more than receptive.
By October 26, Toronto had surprisingly racked up five wins in their last six starts. And still most sports fans were far more preoccupied with baseball. Burns rather liked it that way, even when the Gardens crowd broke off to applaud Jays score updates on the scoreboard. “It’s a tough feeling for the players, hard to concentrate with all the baseball cheers. We’re tied for first place in our division and probably nobody knows about it. Hey, I’d like to take my guys over to the Blue Jays’ locker room and have them rub themselves all over those guys.”
Up next was a home and home series with Detroit, the first major test of the young season for the Leafs. They got ripped 7–1 as the visiting team. “I’m really wondering if we have the stuff to play with the top teams in this league,” Burns seethed. “If it happens again in Toronto, then we’ll know we can’t do it against the good teams. This was just godawful.” He advocated the K-I-S-S principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Toronto did, and rebounded with a 3–1 win, then sent a further message by knocking off mighty Pittsburgh 4–1 at the Gardens. “The game probably opened a lot of eyes about coming into this place. We always wanted to make this our building.”
The coach was preaching the Burns 101 syllabus: No long shifts; if you lose the puck, put yourself in a position to get it back; short and crisp passes; if outnumbered, dump it out of the zone or into the other team’s end; never lose the puck between the blue lines. Burns’s motivational mastery was the added element. He did have the unfortunate tendency of picking on his “whipping boys,” as Gilmour describes those who were most subjected to the coach’s blasts, young Rob Pearson a favourite target. But Burns had no reservations about nailing even Gilmour to the pine for a period if displeased with the effort.
It was early days still, but, as unlikely as it might have been, Toronto had a piece of first place in the Norris, shared with the North Stars, and tied for fourth overall in the NHL. Potvin was a critical component in that chugging-along phase, the number-one goalie of the future bidding to make that future now.
Louise Burns was in the stands when Toronto polished off the Senators in Ottawa 3–1, and still her son wasn’t happy, barking in his players’ ears on the bench. “I got mad because Félix was standing on his head in the first period and we were standing there watching him.” By mid-November, not only were the Leafs atop the division, but they had the league’s best defensive record, though Burns got shirty whenever hung with the “D” descriptor. “Don’t call it defensive hockey or call me a defensive coach. I call it hard work. The message is getting through. We’re trying to make the playoffs, and there’ll be no passengers on the Maple Leafs. There’s no system, no ABCs. It’s just making everyone understand their roles.” He acknowledged being surprised himself with Toronto’s fine start, but grateful because “it’s going to be a dogfight to the end.”
He remained relentless about instilling pride and never took his foot off the pedal. “Passion is a word that Pat used a lot throughout the year,” says Foligno. “That was a team with a lot of passionate players, a lot of leaders who’d been captains on other teams. And we were following our biggest leader, which was Pat. We believed what he said; we wanted to play the way he told us to play. When he saw us get so emotionally involved in a game, he got into it too.”
There weren’t enough superlatives for Burns to invest on Gilmour, especially. He was Killer’s number-one fan and said so at every opportunity. After a game against the Kings in which Gilmour had broken Tomas Sandstrom’s forearm with a two-handed slash, league president Gil Stein assessed a weird penance: Gilmour was suspended for eight non-games and fined $30,000. Burns was infuriated, quickly coming to Gilmour’s defence. “The Kings are always crying about something. They ran our goalie twice. But every time someone gets hurt, there has to be a suspension. L.A. and Pittsburgh, you can’t touch them without getting suspended. People have been too quick to condemn Gilmour. Who knows if Sandstrom’s arm was even broken on that play? I looked at the tape and I didn’t see anything. Why does everyone want to hang Doug Gilmour by a rope until he’s dead? That’s hockey. Guys get whacked all the time.” A columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune nominated Burns as “North American Bozo of the Year” for that screed.
For Gilmour, it was one of the oddest periods in his career. He wasn’t allowed to practise with the team but could dress for games. “After a couple of days, Burnsie says to me, ‘What you been doing?’ I said, nothing.” So the coach arranged to have Gilmour practise with the University of Toronto varsity squad. “These guys are in the middle of exams,” recalls Gilmour. “Their season is pretty much done but they’re still practising. I show up and they’re, like, ‘Are you kidding me? Does that mean we have to skate hard now?’ After the first day, I took them out for wings and beer at the Loose Moose. The next day, we were supposed to practise at two o’clock and I was still hung over. I went in, packed up my equipment and left. I told Burnsie, I can’t skate with those guys anymore.”
On December 1, Toronto lost 8–5 to the Devils. “It was the worst game that I’ve been behind the bench for in my life,” Burns raged. “We can only win one way and that’s by playing a very simple kind of hockey, grinding it out with discipline. But our guys had to get fancy. Obviously, they listened to someone other than the coach.” As punishment, he dragged the team into the conference room at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, the next stop on their road trip, and forced them to sit through a long video session. “Instead of going shopping and eating, we’re going to watch game film. Hey, I stayed up to 1:30 in the morning watching the [expletive deleted] film. It’s like a dog who craps on the carpet. You have to rub his nose in it, so he’ll stop. You have to rub their noses in it sometimes.”
The team was suddenly floundering, on a 2–7–2 skid, the longest slump Burns had ever experienced in the NHL. Fletcher cast about, trying to pick up useful parts, claiming winger Bill Berg off waivers from the Islanders. That’s when Burns uttered his famous wisecrack: “Don’t ask me about him. I wouldn’t know him if I ran over him with my truck.”
A big win over Detroit—f
ive power-play goals from a unit Burns had earlier described sneeringly as the “powder play”—restored life to the squad and seemed to reverse the downward slide. Wrong. When the Leafs blew three leads, and finally the game, 5–4, to Buffalo on December 20—their ninth loss in thirteen games—Burns reached for the sledgehammer. Borrowing a page from the Mike Keenan handbook, he staged his postgame press conference smack in the middle of the visitors’ locker room. “I’m having this press conference in the dressing room so all my players can hear. The tail has been wagging the dog for too long around here.”
The tactic had the aroma of a staged scene, carefully orchestrated, designed to put maximum pressure on his underperforming players. The Leafs had now gone a full month without a road win. He ranted, he raved, he lambasted, saying the only thing preventing him from shipping some of them out was a league moratorium that halted all transactions for Christmas week. Players crept sheepishly in and out of the room. “I remember that,” says Todd Gill. “What Pat was saying was the truth and nobody wants to hear the truth when things are going bad. But you stand up and listen. The hardest thing for an individual to do—and I think Pat taught all twenty-three of us on that team—is you can go as far as you want to go, you just have to push each other. And we started doing that. One thing I loved about Pat Burns is you’d get two or three shifts and if you didn’t hold up to what he thought was good enough, you’d be sat for that period. And then the next period you’d get one more chance. He always gave you that second chance. There were no third chances, but you always got a second chance.” Burns gave Gill another small but useful piece of advice. “When I didn’t have it going and Pat was getting on me, I’d go in the dressing room between the first and second period, gear right down, jump in the shower, get re-dressed and say, okay, I’m starting new. He told me to try that. I did, and things seemed to go better when I could convince myself that I was starting new.”
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