Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  Gilmour dismissed the rant as a “scare tactic.” Wendel Clark, the focus of swirling trade rumours, shrugged and said he hadn’t actually caught a word that Burns spoke. In his off-ice passive way, Clark pushed back. “No player has ever quit since I’ve been here. And there won’t be any players quitting.”

  Burns was bidden to a meeting with Fletcher the next day and, when reappearing for reporters, seemed somewhat subdued, even a bit chagrined by the tantrum that he rated as 8.5 on his own personal eruption scale. “Hockey players are like your children sometimes. You don’t like anybody else criticizing them except yourself. I don’t want people to think I yell at my players constantly because I don’t. I praise my players when praise should be given and I scold them when I think I should. I don’t like to lose, and I want my players to hate losing—not be satisfied with what happened in Buffalo. All I want to do is make this club respectable.” More waggishly, he reached for a metaphor, referencing the horseflesh belonging to Toronto’s new owner, Steve Stavro, who also owned the successful Knob Hill Stable. “It’s like Mr. Stavro said. He treats this business almost like a horse stable, and he’s right. These guys are thoroughbreds. You’ve got to beat them, you’ve got to whip them.” Then, laughing, he added, “But if we break their legs, we promise we won’t shoot anybody.”

  With the trade moratorium lifted, the Leafs did indeed attempt to peddle Clark to Edmonton, but the Oilers backed out at the last minute. When reporters got a whiff of that aborted deal, the captain—only five goals on the season—was put in an awkward position. Burns seemed to damn Clark with faint praise. And he was well aware of what he was implying. “I love Wendel Clark, but are we expecting too much of him? He’s a great team guy and a great role player. His role is to go out and give us a lift once in a while. Maybe we’re looking for the wrong guy to turn us around. Maybe Wendel is more of a support guy.” Was he undermining the captain? Clark read it differently. “Ah, he was just pushing buttons because Pat was good at that. Sometimes, I think Pat was using me to get a message through to the other players. He was really talking to the guys in the room. I might grumble, but he knew I could take it. I had that C on my sweater and he expected more of me.”

  From high-decibel condemnation, Burns settled down to an almost benign absorption of a 4–4 tie in Detroit, a game in which the Leafs blew another lead. “I don’t think we played all that bad, all things considered. We are in Detroit, you know.”

  Perhaps the club’s fast start had been deceptive? The nosedive, with Toronto slipping to seventh, sent Burns back to the blackboard. He reminded the players of what had worked through the first six weeks. They were chasing goals instead of being defensively vigilant to prevent them. They didn’t have the offensively skilled ponies to freewheel, and they’d all got sidetracked. “I’m taking some of the blame,” he lamented. The team would revert to tight-checking hockey and damn the aesthetics.

  As the calendar changed to 1993, on a night when smokers had to butt out for the first time at Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto managed a low-wattage tie with St. Louis. But everyone was keyed up for Burns’s looming return to the Forum. His old media foes from Montreal had descended on the Gardens to bang out their dispatches leading up to the game. Burns was bemused. “You guys were turning cartwheels when I got fired.” The prodigal son’s homecoming even bumped Céline Dion’s Grammy Award nomination off the front page of Le Journal de Montréal, the city’s largest-circulation paper. Journalists did their best to manufacture a feud between Burns and Jacques Demers, comparing and contrasting their styles. Demers had been ridiculed in some quarters for his habit of greeting players when they came off the ice after a game, shaking each one’s hand. Burns, perennially brooding behind the bench, always pivoted immediately and disappeared without a word, win or lose.

  Before this game, Burns walked slowly, dignified, across the Forum ice surface to the visitors’ bench. It was an emotional, pressure-packed match that he wanted desperately to win. From the moment they boarded their flight, his players were aware of the occasion’s significance and Burns’s mood; he’d paced up and down the aisle. When he stepped out of the cab at the arena that night, Burns was greeted by a phalanx of TV cameras. To the media, he professed this was just another middle-season game, of no special significance, but he was lying and nobody bought it.

  Toronto came out hellbent, building up a 4–0 lead, Gilmour tallying two. And then they very nearly caved, hanging on for the 5–4 win, Mark Osborne scoring late in the third. At the buzzer, Burns windmilled his arm triumphantly and, unusually, patted every player as they stomped to the dressing room. “That was one game where Pat never said anything to us beforehand,” says Gilmour. “But you could see how nervous he was. I don’t think I ever saw him that emotional again. It was so important for us to win it for Pat and we did it. It was like a piano falling off his back. It meant so much to him, and then when he pumped his fist at the end … wow. Some guys who’d never been traded before maybe couldn’t understand what it meant, but this was like Pat coming back after being traded. It was very big, for all of us.” Afterwards, Burns admitted circling the date on his calendar. “I thought about it a lot during the summer.”

  The team was now at .500 for the first time since December 1. Later in January, in the rematch at Maple Leaf Gardens, Potvin stoned the Canadiens 4–0, his first NHL shutout. He’d firmly bumped Fuhr, sidelined with an injury, as main man between the pipes, largely due to the faith Burns had placed in him. “He’s going to keep the net as long as he keeps it going. He’s got to understand that it’s his to lose, even when Grant gets back.”

  Something special was starting to happen with this club as it began to put together little win streaks, clawing its way back upward in the standings. Burns’s only complaint was that the Gardens crowd was too quiet. When beer went on sale during games for the first time at the old barn, he snarked, “Maybe a couple of them will get off their hands now.”

  On the road, the coaching staff noticed players hanging together more instead of breaking off into cliques. Nobody ever ate alone. They were becoming a genuine collective. While concentrating on solidifying their playoff position, the Leafs found themselves just five points behind second-place Detroit.

  “Everybody had accepted their role,” says Gilmour. “Pat would still chew us out after a bad game, but sometimes you knew it was just an act. He had to put that face on, so we’d just sit there with our heads down. He’d never scream at me, just give me ‘the look’—squinting his eye the way a cop might look at you, and I knew. The next day, I’d come in just shaking. He was a big man, right, and he could be very intimidating in the dressing room. Actually, he could scare the shit out of us. It was strange; if we were on a winning streak, he made us practise harder. If we lost a few, he gave us more time off. I don’t really know where he learned to handle people, probably from having been a cop.

  “The feeling that was developing on that team, I’ve never experienced anything like it. We didn’t have the best players in the league, but we had good players. He wanted us to go out together as a team, to have a beer, to have team functions. His family was the players in the room and their families. Again, I look at all the teams I’ve played with. There are so many guys who are on their own agenda. That team was different.” One day, they held their team meeting at a watering hole across from the Gardens, P.M. Toronto. Everybody stayed for beers afterward, coaching staff and trainers included. “Believe me, you never see that in the NHL,” says Gilmour. “You just don’t.” The occasional tirades—which weren’t much required anymore—no longer had quite the frightening impact. “We knew he loved us,” says Gilmour, “and we adored him.”

  If not quite loosey-goosey, their spirits were soaring, which triggered ridiculous rounds of internal pranks. Gilmour lost count of the times he arrived at his locker to find the heels of his socks cut out—by dastardly Burns. Almost every day, the coach pricked pinholes in the dressing-room paper coffee cups. On one memorable occasio
n, when the team was in Minnesota, a couple of players balanced cups of water atop the door ledge, expecting to douse the next teammate to walk in. Instead, it was Burns. “He’s got his suit on, his hair’s all perfect, and four cups of water drop on his head,” Gilmour howls. “Todd Gill fell off his stool, he was laughing so hard. And Burnsie just says, ‘I’ll get you back for this, guys.’ ” When Burns was an hour late for practice in Florida, the players subjected him to a kangaroo court and issued a fine. On another road trip, Burns secreted a pair of women’s panties into a suitcase belonging to assistant GM Bill Watters. His wife found them, just as the devious Burns had envisioned.

  At game fifty, Burns met the players individually for one-on-one discussions. There was really no need. They were all stoked. “Even I can’t think of the right things to say right now,” Burns admitted. Fletcher cashed in his biggest insurance asset and sent Fuhr to Buffalo for Dave Andreychuk and backup goalie Daren Puppa. Andreychuk was a true goal scorer and precisely what Burns had been pleading for. “I kept saying to Cliff, ‘I need somebody to play with Gilmour.’ He kept saying, ‘Be patient.’ Well, now I’ve got a guy.”

  The only fly in the ointment was the status of Wendel Clark. The captain had angered Burns by going on an All-Star break vacation to the Turks and Caicos Islands while still recovering from a strained rib muscle. Burns wondered aloud why Clark was unfit to play but fit to frolic on the beach. The coach was irritated over yet another prolonged injury absence by Clark, insinuating he was being too cautious about returning to game action. “I’m not dogging it,” Clark insisted. “You can call me anything you want, but don’t ever say I’m dogging it. You can say I’m a brutal player. You can say I’m brutal defensively and I can’t score anymore. But don’t say it’s from lack of effort.”

  There were even whispers Clark might lose his C. But Burns backed off, insisting his captain had not fallen from grace. “Wendel was the captain before and he’s going to stay captain.” On his first night back after sitting out thirteen games, Clark banged with abandon and scored a vintage Wendel goal against Boston. “I wasn’t out there to vindicate myself. I’ve been injured enough to know when to come back and when not to come back.” Burns was effusive with praise. “He came out of the gate like a bull and kept raging all night. It was great to see him on the bench.”

  Gilmour set a team season record for assists in an 8–1 thrashing of Vancouver, smashing the standard set 16 years earlier by Darryl Sittler. “I was so proud of the team in Vancouver, I could have cried,” said Burns. “I could have hugged every one of them.” Red-hot Toronto was now gunning for its eighth straight game without a loss, in San Jose. Burns nevertheless found stuff to agonise about. “There’s enough time we could still, heaven forbid, go into a slump. Dougie Gilmour, heaven forbid, could get an injury. Something could happen to Félix. I could think of all sorts of ways we could get [expletive deleted].” They were ten games above .500 and flattened the Sharks 5–0. “And I’m supposed to be a defensive coach?” Burns teased. Todd Gill, who’d been a special rehabilitative project of Burns, said: “This guy commands respect. He hates to lose and he has made his players scared to lose.”

  Glenn Anderson collected his 1,000th point in the Vancouver game, and Burns double-shifted him throughout the final two periods, which was appreciated by the player’s three dozen friends and family in the stands. It seemed as though benchmarks in career stats were being reached every night as the season hurtled towards a conclusion. “As we approached the playoffs, we sensed this team was special,” Foligno reminisces. “We started hitting numbers, reaching little milestones on a personal level or statistics-wise as a team—little accomplishments. Pat would make a point of saying, ‘This is so-and-so’s whatever game to have played,’ or consecutive faceoffs won or a road record—things that helped us get focused so that we wouldn’t bury ourselves by looking too far down the road.”

  There was no big secret to the Leaf surge; the team’s best players were leading the charge and the foot soldiers were playing their hearts out. And they were extremely well coached, as illustrated by the club’s defensive record. Just two points behind second-place Detroit, they were now chasing a forty-two-year-old club record of eleven games without a loss. In little more than two months, the Leafs had gone from one of the worst teams in hockey to one of the best. Burns tried to tamp down the giddiness in Toronto, but everybody could tell this team was for real, not an illusion. He grumped about playing at home, “where fans think you can walk on air.”

  Bob McGill, who’d been a member of the 1985–86 Leaf team that had established a club record for futility with only seventeen wins, could scarely believe the squad’s good fortunes and gave all the credit to Burns. “In years past, we had different coaches and a different philosophy every year. There was always turmoil. Guys weren’t happy and we weren’t a team.”

  This was a team, cohesive. The unbeaten streak came to a screeching halt in Detroit on March 5, however, when the Red Wings made the Leafs look lousy, 5–1. This was worrisome because it seemed increasingly likely Toronto would face Detroit in the first round of the playoffs. But they wasted no time getting back on track, soon afterward dumping the Tampa Bay Lightning 8–2. “I think we’ve woken a lot of people up,” said Burns. “Deep down, some of them might be saying, ‘Ah, they’re a bunch of phonies riding a big streak. But I think other teams are starting to notice. If you’re going to build on that, you have to keep working hard. You can’t get to a certain point and then relax.” At practice before that Bolts game, Burns unleashed some rage, shattering his stick against the glass. “I’m just doing my job. I have to make them realize that you can’t go through the motions at this time of the year. If you want to keep the fire burning, you have to outrun the wind.” He’d been working on that quote for a while, as was his habit to keep reporters satisfied.

  With eleven games remaining, Toronto was flirting with first place in the Norris Division—penthouse territory, though no one was allowed to even mention that in the dressing room. The Leafs locked up a playoff spot on March 28 by trouncing the equally hot Flames 4–0. Predictably, Burns saw the glass as half-empty. “We haven’t done diddly yet. We haven’t won anything yet. We haven’t won our division, we haven’t won a playoff round. There’s nothing to get excited about. We can’t fly our flags and say, ‘We’ve made it, we’re done.’ ”

  Yet the players had clearly fallen in thrall to Burns’s unfancy approach to success. They were 25–8–3 since January 6—no other team in the NHL had been better over that stretch—and had just garnered seven out of a possible eight points on their last road trip. In Toronto, many Leaf fans, after weathering misery for so many years, had to pinch themselves and ask, “Are we all hallucinating?” On April 4, the Leafs won their forty-second game, surpassing the franchise record, set in 1950–51 and matched in 1977–78.

  But then there was a slight wobble, a few setbacks that put first place in the division all but out of reach. McGill’s season was ended by a broken jaw. Andreychuk hadn’t scored in five games. A 4–0 defeat by sad-sack Philadelphia, which snapped the Leafs’ twelve-game undefeated record at home, took some of the glow off. That loss guaranteed Toronto a third-place finish in the Norris Division, behind Chicago and Detroit, where first place had been a possibility just a week earlier. Burns waved off suggestions the season of enchantment had spent itself. “Everyone seems to be looking at us thinking we’re going to choke and fold. Good. Let them think that.”

  The final three games were mostly meaningless, though two goals from Foligno in a 4–2 victory over Hartford set a Toronto franchise record for most points in a season. Beating the Blues 2–1 in OT, earning their twenty-fifth home ice victory, established another club record. Their last game was a 3–2 loss to Chicago. The Leafs finished the season with 99 points; the year before, they’d had 67. Everybody was just anxious and eager to start the postseason. “It’s going to be fun,” promised Gilmour. “We’ve got to be happy with the season w
e’ve had, but not satisfied. We’ve got a little bit of work ahead of us still.”

  In an interview with the Toronto Star’s Damien Cox, Burns acknowledged that he was dreaming of a Stanley Cup. “There’s no better feeling than looking up on that out-of-town scoreboard and realizing you are one of only two teams still playing. I think about it every day. There could be a chance this year.”

  While Fletcher was originally cool to the idea, Burns convinced the GM the team should go north to Collingwood for several days of rest, practice and seclusion before the playoffs. When Gilmour’s grandfather died, he wanted to return home for the funeral. “I asked Pat, ‘Can I go?’ He said no. He said, ‘Your grandfather would want you here.’ ”

  On the day before they flew to Detroit to open the playoffs, Gilmour was strolling to the Collingwood rink with Wendel Clark. “There was this guy in an old Camaro. He’s honking and waving at us.” Gilmour smacks his hands together. “Bang! He drives right into a pole. The guy had a kid in the car with him, so Wendel and I run over to make sure they’re not hurt. And this guy, he’s saying, ‘It’s okay, we’re okay, don’t worry.’ Oh man, it was the wildest thing. We couldn’t believe it.”

  And it was just the beginning. Over the next forty-two nights—during which the Maple Leafs would play twenty-one games—all disbelief was suspended.

  Chapter Twelve

  Twenty-one Games in 42 Nights

  “Pressure? What pressure?”

  THE LEAFS used an old bucket of a chartered Air Ontario plane that felt like it was held together by spit and chicken wire. “You’d be sitting there on takeoff, clutching the armrests, never knowing if the damn thing would get up enough speed to lift off the runway,” says Doug Gilmour, shuddering at the memory. Only later on, at the start of the conference final against Los Angeles, did owner Steve Stavro upgrade the team’s transportation arrangements, renting a sleek and spacious 727 with polished attendants serving catered gourmet box lunches. One reporter from each major news outlet was permitted to hitch a lift with the club.