Burns’s “local” was a little pub called The Owl’s Nest. Another habitué was revered author Mordecai Richler. “He smokes like a chimney but never buys cigarettes,” Burns snorted. One night, the two sitting together, Richler complained that he couldn’t find anyone to do maintenance work around his house. “You do know,” said Burns, “that you have to pay them?” Richler cast a beady eye around the regular cast of tipplers and picked one at random. “Hey, do you know how to paint?” The fellow said, sure, he could do that. “Okay, you’re hired. Start tomorrow. Come over when you’ve sobered up.”
Ominous clouds hovered over hockey in the weeks before camps opened. League and players’ association were stalemated in talks over a new collective bargaining agreement. It was rumoured Commissioner Gary Bettman intended to abort any day, with clubs shuttering their rinks before medicals. Tentatively, with nobody taking bets on whether any season would unfold, the camps opened and exhibition games proceeded. Sundin was booed at the Gardens. “I remember coming to Toronto not knowing what to expect. My first meeting with Pat, he called me into his office. Any time a coach brings you into the office, you get worried, and Pat was an especially intimidating guy. He was sitting at his desk, doodling, and he says, ‘What do you think I want to talk about?’ I was nervous, so I laughed a little. ‘Uh, I don’t know, Coach.’ All he said was, ‘You just keep working as hard as you did in Quebec and everything will be fine. Don’t feel like you have to replace Wendel. Be your own guy.’ I tried to be that for him because Pat was the best coach I’ve ever had in my career. He put all his passion into his teams.”
Seven Leafs from the previous season were gone, including stalwart defencemen Bob Rouse and Sylvain Lefebvre. Departed also was a frequent target of the coach’s wrath, Rob Pearson, who practically did somersaults fleeing Toronto as a restricted free agent. Some could cope with Burns’s incessant demands; others, like Pearson, couldn’t, and never escaped the doghouse.
Shaving off his beard was Burns’s signal that he was now in full coaching mode. The potential of this ’94–95 squad tantalized him. “It’s going to be like a whole new team. We’re going to be younger and I think we’ll be more aggressive. But it’s going to take a while before we get everybody pulling in the same direction. There are definitely question marks. Who am I going to play with Sundin? It’s going to be interesting.” There had been a vast turnover, “but we’ve still got our TCB guys.” TCB stood for “Taking Care of Business,” the Bachman-Turner Overdrive anthem that was played at every Leaf home game, along with Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town,” the team’s other musical standard.
Prospects for an NHL season were bleak, however. Burns could only look on in silent incredulity as his players shook hands in solidarity with opponents after exhibition games. Before a game with Detroit, Gilmour and NHLPA president Mike Gartner went to the visitors’ dressing room for a confab. Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman found the door closed to him when he tried to enter, so he went across the rink for a pre-game commiserating chat with Burns. Coaches, sighed Burns, were “neither fish nor fowl” in this labour impasse. He took the team to their usual Collingwood resort for a three-day bonding interlude. “I’d be devastated if we didn’t keep playing. I hear all kinds of things and I have all kinds of hope. Not that I know anything, because I don’t.” Whistling in the wind, he prepared the club for their season-opener against Washington. It would not come to pass. Owners pulled the plug, and rinks went dark October 1.
Months dragged by. Would both sides be so foolish, so averse to compromise, that they’d sacrifice the entire season? Behind the scenes, Fletcher spearheaded conciliatory discussions. “I got involved because the ownership of Maple Leaf Gardens was not happy with the lockout at all.” As a contingency plan, Fletcher presented Toronto’s board of directors with cost-cutting schemes that included layoffs and pay cuts for himself and the coaching staff, but Steve Stavro rejected it. This was all foreign territory for everybody. Burns was still being paid, but there was nothing for him to do. Fletcher dispatched him to scout junior and minor-league games in Quebec. “It was more or less to give him something to stay busy. But we were all just waiting.”
Restless, Burns retreated to the cabin he’d bought in Austin, also on Lake Memphremagog, that summer. It was decidedly rustic and held no charms for Burns’s girlfriend, Tina Sheldon, who visited only once during the 105-day lockout. Burns rode his bike while the weather held and was endlessly on the phone to Fletcher—“What’s the word? Any news?” He accepted an invitation to open a community rink on Broughton Island in Nunavut, flying up to the Arctic territory on an RCMP plane. Informally, he coached youngsters in the Magog area.
At the Gardens, ice was rented out to punters at $500 for seventy-five minutes, resurfacing included. The Leafs and their union brothers had dispersed to play in leagues overseas or in charity games in the U.S. and Canada. Rules prevented coaches from even speaking to their players. Burns paced and prowled, fretful about the players’ conditioning and having to start from Square One if this labour standoff was ever resolved. Not that he necessarily observed the no-communication order. By mid-December, he was covertly calling players, whispering that an agreement would be reached by the end of the year. Burns imparted workout proposals to the guys he most trusted, to pass along. When Toronto reporters discovered a large group of Leafs conducting lively drills at a suburban rink—wearing their Leaf jerseys inside-out—it was assumed Burns was present in spirit. Dave Ellett, sharply managing the drills and scrimmages as pseudo coach, denies receiving any coded instructions from Burns. “No, no, we weren’t allowed to talk to coaches.” But Burns had admitted as much to a reporter: “I’ve told them what I’d do, and what should be done.”
The squabbling NHL sides mustered for three days of meetings in Chicago with a news blackout imposed. Fletcher repeated warnings that a deal had to be reached by the end of the first week in January to salvage a half-season. “I’ve never felt so useless in a situation in my whole life,” Burns moaned. “It’s getting scary. I’m almost starting to think like a fan, where I don’t care anymore. Just tell us if we’re playing or not.”
At the eleventh hour, plus about two thousand, they settled it. Camps reopened January 13, 1995, for five days of manic preparation before a truncated forty-eight-game season, within the conference only, and regular playoffs that could stretch into July to follow. Leaf players anticipated a reign of terror from their boss. “We’re just going to have to hack and whack our way through it until we get in shape,” said Burns. “My focus is going to be on a playoff spot, nothing more. There’ll be no chance to think of where we finish—just get in there and pray we’re healthy and ready. Patience is out the window. I can’t afford to wait. Somebody not producing—sorry pal, you’re gone. We coaches have had a mess dumped on our laps, to be fixed in a hurry. There’s only one way I can do it here—to be more demanding than ever.”
Contract stipulations restrained Burns from whipping his charges into shape with Simon Legree fury; workouts for Training Camp II were limited to three hours a day. At the first afternoon session—Leafs on the ice minutes before Bettman formally declared “Game On”—the coach winced and shook his head. When players were slow on line changes during scrimmages, he barked: “C’mon! This is for the playoffs, the third period of the playoffs!” Skaters gasped, but didn’t gag. “Actually, it wasn’t that bad,” summed up defenceman Jamie Macoun. “He didn’t kill us.”
Twenty-six teams were entering unknown terrain. For the Leafs, with so many new faces, there was the added issue of trying to revive the chemistry that had served them so well over the past two years. They put their faith in Burns, though concerned about his threat that laggards would be heaved over the side. “I don’t have a magic formula. The only good thing is that everybody is in the same boat. I hope nobody takes it easy. You can’t go pacing yourself in a forty-eight-game schedule.” In Vegas, bookies pegged Toronto at 4–1 odds to win the Cup.
The
players looked awkward and sloppy in the first game against L.A., a 3–3 draw on the coast. Then they lost 3–2 in San Jose. Burns juggled his lines maniacally, searching for instant alchemy. At one practice, when sticks went up between Todd Gill and Dave Andreychuk and they exchanged gloved jabs, Burns smiled. “That’s good. Maybe the brotherly love will go away a little bit and we’ll be a little meaner.” In the Gardens opener, Toronto spanked Vancouver 6–2, Mats Sundin superb, selected as first star, if not yet forgiven by fans for the crime of not being Wendel.
There was no sense of continuity or cohesiveness, however, as the season sprinted by. Toronto’s expected offensive prowess wasn’t evident. The sked was front-heavy with road games for Toronto, and Burns claimed he was aiming for merely a .500 record by the All-Star break and somewhere in the region of .700 after that as the team bore down. But this team was clearly having difficulty gelling. Players were also afraid of making mistakes that would get them benched. “Maybe we’re not as good as everybody thought we were,” Burns whined. He was perplexed that the distinctive Leaf passion, the one-for-all ethos, had gone AWOL. “They hesitate to crack jokes or say the things that develop chemistry among a group of men. The togetherness isn’t there yet. Camaraderie is just building.”
Burns no longer had a reliable checker-wrecker line. Gilmour was having trouble getting untracked: The defence had maddening lapses. It quickly became apparent this Leaf squad would go as far as Sundin could take them. After a dispiriting loss to Los Angeles, the dressing room door stayed closed for longer than usual as the players held a team meeting to air out feelings, leaving the Chancellor of Austria—waiting to pose for meet ’n’ greet photos—to cool his heels in the corridor. Burns’s postgame pressers got shorter and brusquer. “It’s got to come from them,” he argued. “For the last couple of years, this team has been finding ways to win; now we’re finding ways to lose.” Twenty-six games into the abbreviated season, Toronto was a middling team. “We have to win our share the rest of the way because the bottom’s coming up,” said Burns. “We don’t want to risk devastation. I hope the players understand that. This is getting to be a life-and-death situation.” As the trade deadline approached, a rather bitchy Burns put his players on alert: “I wouldn’t buy any groceries this week.”
It was a line stolen from Tie Domi, who’d made the observation in Winnipeg, where his status was a subject of debate. Leafs had just played the Jets in Winnipeg. Domi, a right winger, was lining up for a faceoff, back to the Leaf bench, when he heard somebody yapping at him. He turned around, glaring. “Nobody’s mouth was moving. Then I looked at Pat. He said, ‘Yeah, you heard me. I’d like to have you on my right side.’ ” Why Burns coveted Domi was unclear. He already had a proven enforcer in Ken Baumgartner, who famously shouted “Daddy’s Home!” when wading into a scrum in support of teammates. But Baumgartner got little ice time. “We had toughness, but in a lot of games Pat wouldn’t use those guys,” says Fletcher. “He wasn’t comfortable putting them on the ice because the games were too important. Pat’s feeling about Tie was this is a player who can skate, who can play in all situations.” Fletcher made the deal, sending Winnipeg Mike Eastwood, and pulling off four other trades that revamped the lineup. Burns had presented his GM with a shopping list, and Fletcher got to it.
Domi received the call from Burns at 3 p.m. “Told ya.” Huh? Who is this? “It’s Pat Burns and you’re a Leaf. Get on a plane. I want you in the lineup tonight.” Domi caught the first flight available, gleeful at being returned to the franchise that had selected him twenty-seventh overall in the 1988 entry draft, though appearing in just two NHL games before being dispatched to the Rangers. He made it to the Gardens minutes before game time. “I never even saw Burnsie before I got on the bench. I was in the dressing room, changing, and he was on TV doing an interview.” It wasn’t until the next day that they spoke one on one in the coach’s office. “He’s sitting there in sandals and boxers, wearing glasses. I started laughing. ‘What’s so funny?’ I said, ‘That’s quite the sight, Pat.’ And from that moment on, he loved me.”
There was only one month left to get the reconfigured Leafs sorted out, right side up. Burns had his replenished assets, more skill and speed on his roster. Yet he didn’t ease up on the reins or adjust a defensive system designed for the players who were there before. “We had a different team, and we needed to play a little bit of a different style,” suggests Ellett. “I think Pat had trouble coming to grips with that. I mean, that’s why we’d traded for Sundin, right, to open up? But Pat wouldn’t let us.”
In a blur of fits and starts, the Leafs lurched to the finish line, no more disoriented than other clubs. While Montreal was being eliminated from postseason contention, Toronto finished fourth in the Central Division, which meant another first-round tango with the Blackhawks, who had home-ice advantage. Burns didn’t give a rat’s patootie about that, but first rounds always scared him, as they did all coaches. “It’s the toughest round of the playoffs. If you can get by the first round, you’re all right.”
When the playoffs opened, they certainly seemed all right, taking the first two games of the Western Conference quarter-final, Potvin stealing the second with a shutout on forty-two saves, a tall glass of water. “Not much makes me nervous. My dad used to tell me, ‘You’ll never die of a heart attack.’ ” The team stayed overnight in Chicago after game two. And that’s where the trouble may have begun. “Some guys went out after,” says Sundin, who wasn’t one of them. “They got back late. Pat heard about it and was not very happy.” There was more to it than that. A group of players who hadn’t dressed came back to the hotel and got raucous—to the point that there were complaints to management. Burns was roused from his sleep in the wee hours by the night manager. “Please tell them to stop.” The coach was outraged, and not just about having his beauty sleep interrupted. Did these fools not understand what was at stake? He seethed during the charter flight home and ordered the squad directly to the Gardens. “He bag-skated us,” says Sundin. Domi: “That was the first time I’d seen him really pissed off. Old-school bag skate, no pucks, and here we were two games up. He made his point.”
Toronto was halfway there, halfway out of the chaotic first round. The S-word—sweep—was verboten. “The only advantage we have right now is that we have to win two games and they have to win four,” said Burns. “The ’Hawks are a proud team. Nobody’s dead until they’ve been buried and the funeral rites have been given.” Chicago didn’t lie down for the Leafs to kick dirt on them. Led by Eddie Belfour, they went tit-for-tat on Toronto and swiped a pair right back. The series was tied, all Leaf cockiness having vanished. When the ’Hawks won their third game in a row, at the United Center, it felt like the Leafs had fallen down a manhole. Now the underdog status Burns embraced was no longer an act. “We play better when we’re desperate. There’s no one here who’s laid down their guns and said, ‘We surrender.’ The big question is, how much pride are we going to have?” Typically, Burns had stripped the situation down to bumper-sticker platitudes, as if self-regard could compensate for execution and discipline, which had gone down the flusher. And the team did respond, though they were fortunate to escape elimination with a 5–4 overtime win in game six after blowing a 4–1 third-period lead, the crowd bellowing boos. Journeyman spare part Randy Wood—a Yale boy, actually—popped the winning shot ten minutes into OT, after Sundin swung the puck out front on a wraparound attempt. “It’s nothing to be proud of,” admitted Burns, wiping perspiration from his brow, shaken by the third-period collapse. “We found a way to win even when it seemed we were dead as doornails.” The Leafs had merely earned the right to play their fifth game seven in three years. “The pressure is on them, not us,” Burns insisted. There was just enough time between games for him to get clocked speeding by photo radar on Highway 427, his third violation since moving to Toronto.
The deciding encounter was a nightmare for Todd Gill, a reprise of what had been his worst moment as a Maple Leaf—th
e final game of the ’88–89 season, when his giveaway at Chicago Stadium resulted in a goal that put the Blackhawks into the playoffs ahead of Toronto. This time, fate cruelly revisited at 11:53 of the third, Leafs trailing 2–1 but pushing hard for the equalizer. Gill attempted a backhand pass to defence partner Dmitri Mironov that an onrushing Joe Murphy knocked down and turned into a breakaway, flipping the puck over Potvin. Twenty-six seconds later, Chicago scored again to remove any chance of a miracle comeback, an empty-net goal added to wipe out the Leafs 5–2. Toronto, a club conceived to win it all in the wrangled wreckage of a mutant season, had not survived the first round.
“Everything unravelled,” says Potvin. “To be honest, I don’t have many memory souvenirs from that season. It felt like we were just running to make the playoffs and then we were out.” Ellett: “Of all the losses, that was the probably the most disappointing, for Burnsie and for everyone involved.” Nobody could figure out what had gone so catastrophically wrong, how the Leafs could have relinquished a series that had been under firm control. “Up 2–0, you should be able to prevail,” says Fletcher, as flummoxed as anyone else, even years later. “We got beaten.”
Chapter Sixteen
Hitting Bottom in Leafland
“I believe Pat basically fired himself.”
CLIFF FLETCHER WAS URBANE, suave and cultured. Pat Burns was unrefined, blunt and coarse. One was cut from cashmere, the other from broadcloth. Two more diametrically opposed natures could scarcely be imagined. Yet, in hockey terms, they complemented each other. With apologies to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire: “You complete me.” It wasn’t a buddy-buddy relationship, hanging out together on the road, because Burns always remained somewhat diffident about suits with GM honorifics in front of their names. He was the employee and Fletcher “The Boss.” Away from the game, they had nothing in common. Inside the game, they were intuitively bonded, while allowing each other space to operate in their divergent jobs. “Pat was very independent,” says Fletcher. “He wanted to run things his way, which was my management style. I was never a frustrated coach.”
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