And what happened in northern California? The Sharks undressed Toronto 5–2, Ulf Dahlen the spark plug with three goals. It was San Jose’s first playoff hat trick in their, um, ten-game playoff history. Potvin, revolted by his performance, went back to his hotel room and watched the movie Tombstone, which could have been a SpectraVision metaphor for Toronto. Burns tore a strip off his troops. Duly admonished, they responded with majestic ferocity, trashing the Sharks 8–3. Clark set the tone early with a thundering hit on Jeff Norton, bending him over backwards on the boards, the defenceman lying alarmingly still on the ice for several minutes. Then Clark flattened Dahlen for good measure. Leafs used their size advantage on tiny netminder Arturs Irbe, who absorbed a pounding in his crease. Dave Andreychuk came out of playoff narcolepsy with a pair of goals, and Gilmour tied a franchise playoff record, with five points—a goal and four assists.
But, damn it all, upstart San Jose kept coming. Who were these guys? The Shark Tank was so loud for game five that, as Toronto columnist Bob McKenzie wrote of the stentorian Leaf play-by-play broadcaster, “Joe Bowen was asked to speak up.” The Sharks’ 5–2 victory restored their one-game edge in the series, and Toronto was on the ropes, one loss away from elimination as they flew back cross-country. Burns was running out of tricks. He’d tried cajoling. He’d tried cussing. He’d tried extra-hard practice. He’d tried no practice. “It’s very frustrating for me, for the whole coaching staff. I’ll tell you this: we’re not going to be a popular team if we blow it.”
One Leaf was certainly popular, in the fatal attraction sense. It emerged that Gilmour had been targeted by a stalker, a woman who zigzagged crazily from love to hate. She’d made threats over the phone to Gilmour’s brother, David, at the bar he owned in Kingston, hissing that she wanted to kill Doug. That had been a few months earlier. Then she attempted repeatedly to get past security at the Gardens, succeeding on at least one occasion to convince staff she was a friend of the player’s. Gilmour hadn’t taken the threats seriously to begin with, but now he informed his coach, who brought in the police. For weeks, undercover cops followed Gilmour and girlfriend Amy Cable back and forth from games and practices. Additional officers were stationed behind the Leaf bench. No charges were ever laid. Gilmour said he never worried about his own safety, only that of family and friends. Sports celebrities had been seriously attacked before—Monica Seles stabbed courtside by a stranger and Nancy Kerrigan whacked across the knee with a pipe in a plot hatched by the husband of skating rival Tonya Harding.
On the ice, crunch time in game six arrived with overtime. The teams were knotted at 2–2, Clark scoring both regulation-time goals for Toronto. A minute into the extra frame, Garpenlov teed up a slapshot from eighteen feet out in the slot, a rocket that had Potvin clearly beaten, but bounced off the crossbar, the clang heard around the Gardens. “I don’t actually remember the clang,” says Potvin, possibly the only person on hand who doesn’t. The tension was excruciating until Gilmour set up Gartner for the winner.
“Whew,” said Burns as he stepped up to the microphone for his postgame presser. “You guys have no idea what it’s like to coach a National Hockey League team in overtime. Want to feel my armpits? My shirt is soaked with sweat from my armpits to my belt. Yes, it was a draining experience.”
On the off-day before game seven, Burns was even brooding about brooding. “Chuckling, dancing, laughing—that’s not my character. I wish I was a jovial person, but I’m not.” Superstitious, he was stricken to learn that Kevin Gray, star of the hit musical Miss Saigon, would be onstage at the Princess of Wales Theatre and thus unable to sing the national anthem. Burns had come to think of Gray as a talisman in the postseason. “Aaaaaccchhh!” he said when hearing the news. “No, don’t tell me that. Ah, give me a break.”
The Leafs, if not quite nonchalant about game sevens by now, sucked up the stress. Luck, good or bad, had nothing to do with the outcome—a 4–2 win constructed from Clark’s two goals and Potvin’s outstanding goaltending. “Who was worried?” said Burns, tongue firmly in cheek. “It was never in doubt.” No way, Jose.
Burns thought the 2–3–2 playoff format was an abomination. Most observers felt the same way, arguing the configuration favoured the team without home-ice advantage. If visitors split the first two on the road, a series could end in a hurry. Against Vancouver in the Conference final, it would be scratch-and-claw, Burns figured.
“I wish we didn’t have home-ice advantage playing both San Jose and Vancouver,” says Dave Ellett, looking back. “We were put in a difficult position. Losing one at home and now we’ve got to go into their building for three in a row—boy, you want to talk about pressure? It was a tough, tough gig. The style we played, hard hockey, every game a battle, had put a lot of mileage on us. For that Vancouver series, we were playing on fumes.”
Valiant Gilmour was still getting double syringe stabs on his foot before games and the San Jose seven-pack had taken a bite out of everybody. Burns knew his guys were fatigued. He exhorted them to keep digging down. The final would be a Tale of the Two Pats: Burns and Quinn skippering the biggest, most physical teams in the NHL. Both coaches also had big hair. The Canucks had knocked off Calgary in seven and Dallas in five, so were better rested when Quinn led them into Toronto. Quinn, the former Leaf defenceman who’d famously almost separated Bobby Orr’s head from his torso on a thundering, clean check in the 1969 playoffs against Boston, was raised in Hamilton, his father a firefighter. “I’m an ex-Maple Leaf,” Quinn said. “I still have a tattoo on my butt there someplace. That we’re playing in Toronto, the jewel of hockey in Canada, is very satisfying. I’m really happy to be here.”
Game one was a homely dump-and-chase encounter, the only dazzle supplied by Tom Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman in the stands. Peter Zezel, with two goals, won it for Toronto in OT, pouncing on goalie Kirk McLean’s blunder—the Canuck goalie had elected to skate into the corner in pursuit of a loose puck, was checked by Bill Berg, and the puck squirted to Zezel, who had a totally unguarded net to shoot at.
In game two, Gilmour assisted on all three Leaf goals, two by Ellett, but Toronto lost 4–3, and the worst-case scenario was unfolding as Burns had feared. “I kept telling the players, the [game one] effort wouldn’t mean a thing if they didn’t win game two as well. The Vancouver Canucks came in here looking to split, and they did. They understood what was at stake. We didn’t, apparently.” Mark Osborne recalls: “We were flat. And now we’re going to Vancouver for three and it was, like, aaaggghh.”
Quinn—coach, GM and president of the Canucks—complained his team was suffering from a media-generated eastern bias. Insults were flung between coaches, even drawing in Fletcher, as old grievances from regular-season games were dredged up. “They’re resurrecting stories that Captain Cook read in the newspapers when he came through here,” Quinn quipped.
Countering with their own celluloid star power, the Canucks had Mel Gibson in the stands at the Pacific Coliseum for game three. Leafs were never in it. The match, won 4–zip by Vancouver, was punctuated by a third-period brawl that started when Gilmour was checked behind the net by Tim Hunter. It was completely legitimate, if bone-rattling, contact, but Rob Pearson took umbrage and rained punches on Hunter, who refused to fight back. Within seconds, fights broke out all over the ice. As Pearson departed for the dressing room, Burns could be seen mouthing, “Good job.” Five players, including Gilmour, were ejected.
Up in the press box, Vancouver’s director of player personnel, George McPhee, apparently enraged watching Bob Rouse whaling on Jeff Brown, angrily pounded his fist against the glass pane, shattering it into smithereens. Shards of broken glass went flying, so startling off-ice official Gary McAdam that he toppled backwards in his chair, knocking himself out cold against an iron bar.
Burns had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He sought to breathe a second wind into his players. “It’s now or never for this club. If we’re going to win a Stanley Cup, it’s got to be this season,
immediately. We had a chance a year ago. We’ve got a shot now. I don’t think we could expect to have the same opportunity next season with this group of players.” But, as he confided to a friend, he knew; after game three, he knew. “We’ve run out of gas.”
At practice the following day, Burns delivered an eloquent monologue on the harsh beauty of hockey to a rapt audience of reporters, speaking about ethics and honour and childhood Cup dreams. “It’s still my dream.” On the subject of rejuvenating his players, he said: “My job is to make them forget about how tired they’re feeling, to make them forget their injuries. If we lose because we’re not good enough, we’ll have to accept it. But I think we’re good enough. That’s why we’re not going to quit. We’re never going to quit.” He railed against the “cheap shots” the Canucks inflicted on his Leafs. “There used to be a code of honour in hockey. That’s the way I still coach. I would never tell my players to go out and make cheap hits. Is that what we’ve come to? Is that where we’re going?”
Where the Leafs were going was to a second consecutive shutout as Vancouver took the fourth game 2–0. McLean was lights-out. Toronto was on the precipice, teetering, and Burns was all out of stirring speeches. At the team hotel, he shared a quiet poolside lunch with Gilmour, Wendel Clark and Todd Gill. The coach admitted he had no more rabbits to pull out of the hat. “Maybe a bunny, but not a rabbit.” Later, the team enjoyed a relaxing cruise in Vancouver harbour, Burns standing at the rail, looking pensive. “Guys, we’re going to have to all hold hands together and pull in the same direction. Who knows what can happen?”
The inevitable happened, albeit in dramatic fashion. Gill, who’d injured his ankle, took a freezing injection, just like Gilmour, and begged to play, but Burns wouldn’t permit it. “It was the right call; I realized that after,” says Gill. “But at the time, I wanted to play so bad and Pat was worried I’d hurt myself worse. I said, ‘But I got the damn thing shot up, let me play!’ The thing is, Pat really did care about his players. I respect him for that, but at the time I was ready to kill him.”
At the start of game five, before the opening faceoff, Burns moved slowly along the bench, patting every Leaf on the back, leaning over to speak words into their ears. Enlivened, Toronto built up a three-goal lead in the first period and then watched it evaporate. Locked 3–3, they played on into double overtime, Greg Adams scoring fourteen seconds into the fifth period, giving Vancouver the 4–3 win and the series. The Leafs, again, were done, Vancouver moving on to face the New York Rangers in the final, losing in seven. “That week in Vancouver, never winning a game, was the longest week I’d ever spent,” says Fletcher.
Burns offered decidedly cool congratulations in his requiem. “The Vancouver Canucks will represent Canada very well in the Stanley Cup finals. But I won’t admit they were the better club. I won’t admit that.”
Chapter Fifteen
Locked Out and Loaded
“Who am I going to play with Sundin?”
“IF THEY WANT TO STAY with the team they’ve got, then maybe it’s time for me to move on.”
There was no subtlety to Pat Burns. He wasn’t going anywhere, although the Nordiques were making overtures, clandestine lest they be accused of tampering. GM Cliff Fletcher would soon put a stop to that, with a two-year contract extension and honking-huge raise. Burns’s tacit ultimatum, delivered through the media, was the coach wailing for a roster shakeup, fidgety because the squad as constituted had regressed, was living on borrowed time. So, in the weeks after Toronto was eliminated from the playoffs—final four once more, but no further—Burns lobbed his mini-grenade.
It was widely agreed that personnel adjustments were required. Nobody, however, sensed the shock wave coming. On June 28, 1994, the first day of the NHL entry draft in Hartford, Fletcher made the knock-me-over-with-a-feather announcement that Toronto had traded Wendel Clark to Quebec for Mats Sundin. Oh my. Among Leaf fans, the disbelief was staggering, the outrage instantaneous. Trade Wendel? How could they? Reached at home by the Toronto Star, Don Cherry sputtered: “This isn’t April 1, is it? This must be a joke. I hope somebody’s kidding me that you would trade Clark for Mats Sundin.”
It was no joke. The audacious Silver Fox had done the inconceivable, the unimaginable. The blockbuster trade involved six players, but Clark was the price for obtaining twenty-three-year-old Sundin, the number-one draft pick overall in 1991, who’d been in the 100-point district two out of three seasons. Despairing Leaf Nation went into paroxysms of grief, feeling genuinely betrayed. Fletcher knew he’d be vilified. He’d tossed and turned the night before, vacillating over the deal. Nordiques GM Pierre Lacroix had approached him with the idea. At that point, moving Clark hadn’t been on Fletcher’s radar. It was later suggested Burns had been a fifth columnist, scheming to put a whole lot of gone between himself and Clark. Theirs had been a distant and sometimes strained relationship, lacking the symbiotic intensity that existed between Burns and Doug Gilmour. “They hated each other,” says one Leaf who was there at the time. “It made Pat crazy that Wendel wouldn’t play hurt and basically did nothing in practice.” Certainly, the coach had, on several occasions, publicly challenged his captain. “We got along well enough,” counters Clark. “He was a good coach, not like some who wish they were players instead.” And Burns acknowledged that, in the clutch, Clark had usually answered the bell. Now, the captain was about to get his bell rung emotionally. “It broke my heart,” Clark says.
Burns did not promote the trade, says Fletcher. “I cannot recollect Pat ever coming to me saying, ‘We have to trade Wendel.’ What happened was Quebec had lost to Montreal in the playoffs. In their minds, they had been physically intimidated in that series. Lacroix started talking to me about Wendel. I said, ‘Well, we’ve never even thought about trading Wendel. But I might look at it if Mats Sundin would be coming our way.’ When they agreed to that, it was something we had to do. Mats was young, he was big, he was a horse. You had to do it.”
Jettisoning the captain was agonizing, though. “Wendel Clark had been the hope of the Maple Leaf franchise for years, the only thing they had,” says Fletcher. “Wendel represented eternal hope in Toronto, and I appreciated that.” A Leaf icon, undoubtedly, but Fletcher was being paid to make the burdensome decisions to better the team, and this was a club verging on old and spent.
Clark had spent that day filming a breakfast cereal commercial in Toronto. Bowled over by the news when Fletcher called, he went home, where reporters quickly gathered on his doorstep. A white stretch limo idled in the driveway. In the back seat was close friend Tie Domi, then a Winnipeg Jet, sipping a beer. Sundin, meanwhile, was at Borje Salming’s hockey school in Sweden when informed he was now a Leaf. The legendary defenceman assured Sundin all would be well, that he’d love playing hockey in Toronto. Sundin never spoke with Burns until the big Swede arrived in town for training camp. Said Fletcher, “I don’t think we’ll be as good a team October 1, but I’m hoping by March we’ll be a better team.”
When the draft was over, Burns was booked on a puddle-jumper back to Montreal. At the Hartford airport, he ran into Pat Hickey, longtime hockey reporter for the Montreal Gazette. Their flight was delayed and the two Pats repaired to the bar, where they were joined by Jacques Lemaire, who was coaching the Devils at the time. Burns and Lemaire spent the next three hours sipping martinis and talking hockey—“What a horseshit job it was to coach the Canadiens,” Hickey recalls. The flight was eventually cancelled, but the trio—two of them well refreshed by now—were put on a plane to Boston, with a connection to Montreal, arriving shortly before midnight.
Hickey didn’t have a car, so Burns offered him a ride. “Burns found some coffee at the airport, we found his truck and we sat there for about thirty minutes while he made some phone calls. While we were waiting, an RCMP cruiser came past, and it stopped when the driver recognized Pat. Jacques Demers was in the cruiser because he was looking for his truck, which had been stolen. Demers yelled out at me, ‘I see you’
re getting a ride with the ex-coach!’ At which point, Pat replied: ‘I still have a job, you fat fuck!’
“I live about ninety kilometres from the city, and Pat was another thirty kilometres further,” Hickey says. “He was driving about 140 kilometres an hour in the rain, and at one point, I reminded him that there was a speed trap near the Bromont exit. He said he wasn’t worried about a ticket because he was part of the brotherhood. As we approached my exit, Pat wanted assurances that I didn’t live too far off the autoroute because he was getting tired. I told him it was only a kilometre and offered him our guest room, but he said he wanted to get home. About thirty minutes after he dropped me off, I called his cell to make sure he got home okay. There was no answer. I called again five minutes later, and Pat answered. He said he was in his driveway and he thanks me for calling because he had stopped the car but had fallen asleep with the engine running.”
Gilmour, as expected, inherited the C. Fletcher and Burns had sat down, looked at each other, and immediately agreed. “There wasn’t even a discussion,” the GM told a media gathering. “We both knew it was Gilmour. I expect Doug to play with the Leafs until he retires. And he’ll be captain as long as he plays.” Really, general managers should watch those declaratory statements.
Burns flew to Toronto for the formal announcement of Gilmour’s captaincy at the Hockey Hall of Fame, then went directly back to the Eastern Townships—didn’t even stay overnight. On Lake Memphremagog, he had a new neighbour in Félix Potvin that summer. “If you want to get away from it all, I’ll tell you a place,” the coach had advised. Potvin purchased the property where he still resides. “My mom and dad came to visit and we decided to take a boat ride,” Potvin remembers. “Mom asked me to show her where Pat lived. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to go there on the boat. What if he’s outside and sees us spying on him?’ But I steered the boat by Pat’s place and, sure enough, I see him coming down the dock. He recognizes me, waves us over. We talk for a while, have some beers. He was great with my mom. Away from the rink, Pat was a really fun guy, a different person. But he never mixed his job and his fun time.”
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