In late October, it was time for that talk. Burns called a meeting. “The team seemed to be separated between the young players and the old. I told them to wash their dirty clothes together.”
That comment gave short shrift to what, in actuality, was a severe rift cracking open between younger guys and older guys, between veterans and coach. Publicly, Burns always paid lip service to the wise counsel imparted by his elder statesmen. They were a fount of advice and the team’s backbone. But they were also busting his balls. He vacillated between awe and what some of those veterans construed as scorn, with the upstart exhibiting insufficient regard for their input, failing to adequately consult. Of course, Burns was striving to assert his primacy over the club. Further, he was attempting to cultivate a second tier of more youthful leadership, fully aware the club would soon need to transition into a post-Gainey, post-Robinson era.
Russ Courtnall, traded to Montreal from Toronto on November 7, sensed this internal tension immediately upon entering his new dressing room. “There were definitely some issues with some of the older players and Pat. And one of them was definitely with Larry [Robinson]. When I got there, Larry was threatening to quit the team, he was so unhappy. Eventually, they figured it out. I don’t know how, but within maybe a week it had been smoothed out. It all went away. Maybe Pat stopped challenging them or realized that these guys were assets he could use to help him become a better coach.”
In the locker room, Courtnall’s stall was next to Gainey’s. “Before every game, Pat would walk over to him with a piece of paper and they’d talk in French,” Courtnall recalls. “I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they’d point at all the players’ names on this paper and they’d have maybe a two-minute conversation. Then Pat would walk away. I know Pat respected Bob and Larry, but I think he realized he had to show that in front of all the other players. Once that happened, everything was fine.”
Had the Canadiens enjoyed a stronger start, there likely would not have been much conflict in the room, though it’s difficult to say which propelled which. “There was some fitting together early on in the year and, not being one who stops and analyzes a lot, I didn’t look at it as specifically towards me or the veterans,” says Gainey. “The whole team was off kilter. We’d had a pretty good run of five or six years, and this was near the end of it. But as the year progressed, I think there was real harmony there. We found a rhythm that was inclusive with veterans and good young players and ultimately had a very smooth and enjoyable season.” Gainey attributes that segue to a combination of factors. “Players finding their place, their specific responsibilities on the team, having them either defined to them or just coming to understand them. Having the right players to fulfill those kinds of slots—a very good offensive centre, a very good goalie, a power-play defenceman, and we had all of those. So much of it is about momentum. Once things start to rumble in a positive way, it feeds on itself. That was one of those teams in the late ’80s that is often dismissed because of the lack of good players. But if you take a closer look at the lineup, you discover all these players [who] are in the Hall of Fame or who played on their national teams, in the U.S., in Europe, in Canada. You see older, very successful players from the generation before. You see younger players who went on to be successful in the following generation. It was a great combination.”
Burns had to make it work or there was no going forward. The new coach needed to show he was heeding the sagacity of veterans. There was veneration among teammates towards Gainey and Robinson, the only players left from Montreal’s four consecutive Stanley Cup teams, 1976 to 1979. “A big part of the group listened to those veterans, Gainey and Robinson,” says Roy. “They had a lot of influence. I think Pat and Bob were not eye to eye. I think Pat wanted to push Bob aside. And I thought that was a mistake.”
Gainey picks his words carefully. “I think Pat had an idea that he had to establish himself as the alpha male. If that was the case, where he was trying to push some of the veterans out, he probably instigated better play in those veterans by challenging them. With time, there was a balance there, where he understood what those players bring and maybe didn’t feel that he had to be as … not demanding or controlling, but clearly and visually in charge, that he could let things play out a bit more.”
The situation took some finessing by Burns, a bit of genuflecting that did not come easily to him. The scraping was acknowledged, wounded feelings appeased, and the players made a commitment to coalesce behind Burns rather than invite more disruption from above. Burns was smart enough to relent somewhat in return, ditching what had clearly not been working in the early stages of the season, abandoning an offence-first system that wasn’t in his nature anyway. Montreal hadn’t been effective playing that way, and now they swung back to a grinding style, abetted by a resurgence of strong goaltending.
In other conspicuous ways, though, Burns was unyielding, sticking to his guns as enforcer-in-chief. He banned beer on the team bus and brought in a Breathalyzer device to show players how little alcohol it takes to cause impairment. Speaking from experience, Burns told the players: “The police don’t want to hear your story. All that’s important to them is you’ve had too many and you’ve killed someone with your car.” He restored devotion to curfew observation. Even charter flights were quieter than in recent years. Customarily, a coach sits in the front. Burns altered his perspective, sitting in the back of the plane, arms folded across his chest, eyes straight ahead. Players could feel that stare. It was a seating arrangement Burns would maintain throughout all his years in the NHL. “I just didn’t like a couple of things that were going on early in the season. I didn’t like the card games with the big money pots. Guys having a couple beers before a game, stuff you don’t want to see.”
His rules provoked no sedition. Apart from the new conduct regulations, players adjudged Burns to be less strict than Perron. Under the former coach, the athletes felt they were treated like adolescents and often responded like brats. “Pat gives the players a little bit more freedom and he doesn’t treat us like a bunch of schoolchildren,” said Robinson. “He has brought a lot of discipline to our club, something that was lacking in previous years. If you keep a dog chained up too long, it becomes a very angry dog, whereas, if you give your dog some freedom and still keep the leash tight, it becomes a different animal. Pat gives guys plenty of rope, lots of freedom, but if they don’t handle it the right way, then he reels it in. He’s established that he’s the boss, but he doesn’t flaunt it.”
Picking up the canine metaphor, Savard observed: “Pat doesn’t have a doghouse that players get in and then have trouble getting out of. He deals with problems on the spot and then forgets about them. That means the air is cleared around the team very quickly, which helps to make a good atmosphere.”
From the outset, Burns demonstrated the firm hand expected of him. No eyebrows were raised when he didn’t have Claude Lemieux in uniform after the player had turned in a tepid performance. Lemieux returned to the lineup and scored three goals in the next game. The coach benched Lemieux again for taking a bad penalty—actually a double minor and a game misconduct—and “putting on a floor show.” That let everyone know Burns was, as Savard had promised, “the man in charge.” And no one rushed to defend Svoboda when the young defenceman argued he didn’t deserve a suspension resulting from a high-stick infraction that Burns called “very, very stupid.”
In late October, Montreal ground out a 1–1 tie in Boston and, while not pretty, Burns saw glimmers of the team he hoped was emerging from its early torpor. “We’ll get better,” he vowed at his postgame press conference. “We had to eat some crow for a while. Now it’s time for some turkey and chicken.” A fortnight later, Burns dispatched Guy Carbonneau to the press box and Montreal beat the Canucks 3–1 in Vancouver. That, most observers agree, was the turning point. Scratching Carbonneau from the lineup took cojones. The Frank Selke Trophy winner the year before as the league’s top defensive forward, Carbo
nneau had missed only seven games over the previous six seasons.
Upon Burns’s hiring, Carbonneau had applauded the move. “These days you need a disciplinarian to handle the younger players. Many of them come out of junior spoiled and they need someone to put them straight.” But he was no kid and certainly never anticipated falling victim to Burns’s evil eye. The coach, however, wanted Carbonneau to aspire to greater things than being a premier checker. Burns told the defensive stalwart he was playing too defensively. In dramatic fashion, he was challenging Carbonneau to contribute more on the attack, and that was unprecedented. “I said, ‘Be on the puck more, and you’ll get goals,’ ” Burns explained. “He said, ‘No, I can’t do that, I’m a defensive player.’ I said, ‘Well, sit on the bench, then.’ ”
Confronting Carbonneau was a gamble for Burns, already criticized in some quarters for favouring anglophones over francophones in distributing ice time. But the benching and spurring conversation lit a flame under Carbonneau, triggering a remarkable transformation. Indeed, Carbonneau would go on a tear, potting 24 goals that season, 10 of them game winners, while putting up a plus-34 rating. “From that moment, everything started coming together,” he said.
The other event of metamorphosis was addition by subtraction—Burns ridding himself of brash, troublesome John Kordic in what would go down in hockey history as one of the most disastrous trades ever for Toronto. The twenty-three-year-old enforcer and Burns were, surprisingly, chalk and cheese—or, more accurately, tinder and match. Kordic, who pined to be more than a pair of fists on skates, had expected an increased workload when Burns got to town, but the opposite resulted as he dressed for only six of Montreal’s first fifteen games. Kordic didn’t hide his displeasure. “Burns makes no secret that he’s got ‘his boys’ and he’s going to play his boys. I thought I was one of his boys at the start, but obviously not. I told them if they weren’t going to play me, I wanted out. I told them to get rid of me.”
There had been an infamous incident early on that poisoned the relationship between Burns and Kordic, although it went unreported at the time. They’d almost come to blows. Burns recounted the episode to his old mentor Charlie Henry. “This guy’s yakking off in the dressing room, this and that, how he’s not playing enough. Then he comes right into my goddamn office. He’s standing there mouthing off at me. I had a big glass ashtray on my desk. So I took the ashtray and I threw it at him. Just lucky I didn’t hit him, hit the wall instead and it broke into pieces. Kordic put his hands up and says, ‘You’re fucking crazy!’ ” Burns responded menacingly: “I am crazy. And if you’re not happy, we’ll go down in the street right now and there will be no linesman to stop me.” Instead, Kordic ran into the dressing room, screaming, “The fucking coach is crazy!”
Kordic stormed out of the rink. Burns waited a few minutes, and then poked his head into the dressing room, inquiring, “Where is he?” The players said, “He’s gone, Coach.” To Henry afterwards, Burns fumed, “That nut could have jumped over the desk and killed me.” What Burns told reporters much later, revisiting the scene, was: “I told him to come back when he got some manners.”
Burns also embarrassed Kordic when, after finding him in the team’s whirlpool tub, he made a crack about being sure to drain the water lest sexually transmitted diseases be spread to his teammates.
Something had to give. Kordic was already so disgruntled that he spent as little time as possible at the Forum, even putting aside his passion for working out in the weight room. Such was his stress that at one point he landed in hospital for a few days with chest pains. What was allegedly unknown at the time was Kordic’s heavy drug use—cocaine addiction compounded with alcohol, double demons that would ultimately bring him to a sad end, death by cardiac arrest in a Quebec City hotel room, just twenty-seven years old.
Burns reported the ashtray incident to Savard, but the GM had already heard enough about the increasingly volatile Kordic. In young Toronto general manager Gord Stellick, he found a sucker—er, agreeable trading partner—with Leaf coach John Brophy enthusiastic about making the deal. In return, Montreal got Courtnall, the speedy sniper who’d been languishing on the pine under Brophy. As a Canadien, Courtnall would be reborn, his offensive creativity valued by Burns on a team that had dim scoring wattage.
“I couldn’t believe how young he was,” says Courtnall, recalling his introduction to Burns. “It was only about twelve games into the season, so not too many people knew much about Pat yet. He was a tough man, a tough coach. Sometimes we didn’t understand what he was really wanting out of us. But he was good to play for because he really demanded the most out of you.”
Brophy—who would be canned by late December, replaced by George Armstrong—had been a screamer, too. “But there was a difference,” says Courtnall. “Pat had Jacques Laperrière as his assistant, and they ran good practices. Pat didn’t say a lot unless we were not doing what he wanted us to do, and then we’d hear it.” Laperrière, the Hall of Fame Habs defenceman, was a gentle yin to Burns’s tempestuous yang. “They were a really good team together. Jacques was quiet, but he had played in the NHL. And Pat, when things needed to be sorted out, came down on us pretty hard.”
Courtnall was impressed by the Canadiens’ use of videotape for instruction, though Burns was no Roger Neilson disciple and often left those sessions largely to Lappy. Says Courtnall: “We watched video before every game. We studied other teams, dissecting their strengths and weaknesses. Pat’s teams always understood before every game what the other team did really well and what they didn’t do well.”
Astutely, Burns moved Courtnall from centre to right wing, to exploit his speed and shooting ability. “At centre, you have a lot of defensive responsibilities,” says Courtnall. “When I went to right wing, I had less on my plate to worry about and the game became a lot easier for me.” It proved a brilliant move. Courtnall would finish the season with 22 goals in 64 games for Montreal.
In Toronto, Kordic was tattling to anybody who would listen about the purported dissension in Montreal’s dressing room, with veterans and francophones disgruntled over ice time invested in anglos and young’uns, Burns favouring his “Sherbrooke” boys, Mike Keane and Brent Gilchrist. “Some of the older guys, some of the sharpshooters on the team, aren’t too happy,” Kordic blabbed. “In the last minute of a game, you don’t see Bobby Smith and Mats Naslund on the ice. You see Keane and Gilchrist.”
There was truth in his accusation. Burns’s attachment to Keane and Gilchrist was noted, disapprovingly, by the French media, always quick to pounce on any perceived snub of francophone Habs. “Mike and I, we didn’t read the French newspapers or listen to French radio and TV, which was probably an advantage,” says Gilchrist. “But Pat spoke the language. They accused him of not liking francophones, and Pat at first thought that was funny. He’d say, ‘But I am French.’ He played the players he wanted to play, the ones he believed in. Mike and I were criticized at times, but I think for the most part we proved ourselves and those days disappeared. Those first two or three months, though, there were some strong young French-Canadians playing in the American League—they eventually became Montreal Canadiens—but we got there first. And Pat stuck to his guns. He took a lot of heat. I think Pat knew if he was going to be successful, he couldn’t cave in to the media telling him who to play. He said, ‘I’m going to play the guys I think can help us win hockey games.’ And we did.”
Burns was simply glad to shed the pain in the neck Kordic had been. And Courtnall was thriving under his direction, pulling spectators out of their seats with his rushes. There was no fuzzy warmth between Courtnall and coach, however. Courtnall credits Burns with making him a top-notch professional hockey player, but allows that the gruff boss always remained something of an enigma.
“He just didn’t want the players to get close to him. Every morning for four years, I’d walk by his office and stick my head in his door, say good morning. And not once would he say good morning back to me. Ever. One
time I ended up having breakfast with him, by accident, near the Forum and it was so uncomfortable. He was a grumpy coach. He just didn’t want his players to get too close to him.
“Once you left his team, went to play somewhere else, he was totally different, nice and jolly. In the Forum, at practice, he would jump up on the boards and talk to guys on other teams, laughing. There were guys he’d coached as juniors, and he was very friendly with them. We were always, like, ‘I wish he was like that with us.’ We didn’t have the best of relationships, Pat and I. I think I was a player that kind of frustrated him at times. But I sure played hard for Pat. Everybody wants to get recognition for what they’re doing well or their hard work. Pat just wasn’t a guy who would too often pick you out of a lineup and say, ‘Hey, good game tonight.’ ”
Abruptly, the good-game nights started coming as the team began putting together winning streaks. By November 25, the Canadiens had gone undefeated in eleven of their past dozen, if largely on the strength of superb goaltending from Roy, who was proving unbeatable at the Forum. Burns was suddenly coaching one of the hottest teams in the league. With a victory over Boston on December 12, Montreal had lost only two of their last twenty-two and led the Adams Division by twelve points, opening up a huge bulge over Boston that the Bruins would never bridge. At Christmas, the joke in Montreal was that, when the Canadiens began the season 4–7–1, Burns was a dopey cop. Now he was an Einstein coach, tacking 100 points onto his bench IQ. They went four-for-four on a swing through the Smythe Division and extended their win streak on the road to eight games, even absorbing, without alarm, the broken right foot that would shelve Gainey for six weeks.
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