Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  The turnaround was remarkable: the Bruins were thirty points better than the previous year. “It was a combination of things,” says Bourque. “We had those two first-round picks. Sergei probably had a bigger impact than Joe off the bat. But we’d also signed some free agents and got a lot better in terms of talent and character, special guys like Rob DiMaio and Timmy Taylor, role players but major leaguers who were really important in the room. Probably we were a team that overachieved because a lot of people were not looking at us to have that kind of jump. And Pat was the one who jelled everything together.”

  Against Washington in the first round, the Bruins’ Brigadoon season dissolved in six games, two of which went into double OT. Before game six, Burns shaved off the goatee he’d worn most of the year, hoping to change his team’s luck, to no avail. Yet elimination didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of a club that had pulled itself off the scrap heap. If Sinden and O’Connell yearned for razzle-dazzle, it was incumbent on them to lasso the talent in the off-season. Bring me the horses, said Burns, “and I’ll give you tic-tac-toe. I don’t think our style is boring, but you have to adapt to the team you have. Firewagon hockey, that’s what we called it in the old days, like in the past with the Flying Frenchmen and the French Connection. That’s all nice and fine if you have that personnel. But if you don’t have it, you have to adapt.”

  Could the coach be any clearer? Or, with a third Jack Adams bestowed in June, any taller in the saddle? “This is our Academy Awards,” Burns beamed in accepting the accolade. “We’ve directed films all year long, and there are stars of the movies … and you have the directors, who are the coaches.” In a serene state of mind, he took Line to the Caribbean for a holiday. At the time of his hiring in Boston, Burns had warned his girlfriend, “I’m different in hockey than out of hockey.” Line would find out, he said, “if she can stand me.” Evidently, she could. The couple married in Anguilla. Bourque was the best man. “My wife and I were in St. Barts. We took a nice little boat ride over to where Pat and Line were.” The foursome had become warm friends, Bourque’s wife, Christiane, especially cozy with Line. Bourque remembers the lovely nuptials: “The ceremony was on the beach. We had dinner with them afterwards and went back to St. Barts that night.”

  In Boston, however, it was no longer all hearts and flowers. The first inkling that the coach’s wishes were irrelevant came with management’s failure to protect Ellett and Baumgartner in the expansion draft. Surviving the exposure, Ellett was relegated to bit player in his second Boston year. He fingers assistant GM O’Connell as the villain. “He’s the one who ended up pulling out the rug from under Burnsie because Burnsie didn’t like him and wouldn’t listen to him. That’s why I got shit on there, because I was one of Pat’s guys. First year, I never missed a game; then all of a sudden, in the second year, I’m in the press box. Pat told me, ‘I can’t help it. But once the playoffs start, it’s my team and I can play who I want, and you’re in.’ The next year, they got rid of me.”

  Year two for Burns in Boston began with four key training-camp holdouts and a failed comeback attempt by Cam Neely. It soon became apparent the team seemed less cohesive than the year before. Tensions developed over ice time, especially for Samsonov, who experienced a midseason goal drought. A few stories appeared about things no longer so rosy in Black and Yellow Country. Ellett suspects some of these early anti-Burns barbs were planted by management “because they couldn’t boss Pat around.” Yet, to Ellett, Burns seemed happier and more relaxed. “Coaching had become more enjoyable for him. He learned that he didn’t have to be as hard on people every day. It wasn’t killer practices all the time, yelling and screaming. He was having fun.”

  The team was hard to figure out, though, consistent only in its inconsistency. O’Connell artlessly rebuked Burns’s handling of Samsonov to a reporter. Stung, Burns swung back in a radio interview. “I don’t question Mike’s drafts. He has pressure once a year, and that’s the twenty-seventh of June or whenever the draft is. Second-guessing will always be part of management and I think that’s normal, but doing it publicly is another thing. I’m hurt. I would have appreciated it more if this had been talked about behind closed doors. Mike had an opportunity to coach this team before me. Maybe he thinks he should have been the coach. If Mike wants my job, he knows how to get it.” O’Connell hastily apologized. “This is the last thing I wanted to happen.” They kissed and made up but the war of words would escalate. “That was not a real compatible situation,” says Sinden.

  From January into February of that second season, the Bruins went into a 0–6–2 skid. Burns told Line to take a vacation by herself. Stress was making him more grouchy and distant than usual. “It changes your life around because you’re taking it home more. Often, you’ll sit there and people are talking to you and you don’t hear them. My wife will be talking to me and she’ll say, ‘You’re not listening to me.’ And I’ll say, ‘Yup, I’m not.’ It’s because your mind is churning all the time.”

  Burns sought the opinion of everyone—from reporters to the FleetCenter’s janitorial staff. “I’m not a one-man show. I listen to everybody, but I’m the one on the firing line. Sometimes I have a fraction of a second to make a decision. That’s what I like about Harry. He’s the best general manager I’ve ever had because he’s been there as a coach, he knows. Serge was never there. Cliff was never there.”

  A late-season surge vaulted the Bruins over Buffalo into sixth place in the East. They finished with the exact same point total as ’97–98 but had to work harder for it. In the opening playoff round, Boston drew Carolina as an opponent. It was a tight, closely contested affair with Bruins netminder Byron Dafoe—who racked up ten regular-season shutouts—a standout, impenetrable in two of the six games. That triumph got Boston one round further, but, for their labours, they now had to confront Buffalo and dominator goalkeeper Dominik Hasek. Bruins made the sublime Hasek look ordinary in game one of the Eastern Conference semifinals. Burns sought to extinguish some of Hasek’s aura: “I think he let some goals in this year. His goals-against average was not zero, zero, zero—was it? The guy has been scored on before.”

  The Bruins dropped the next three. Burns rallied the troops after losing the fourth game 4–1. “It was an old-fashioned ass-booting. But it’s not how you get put down on your ass. It’s how you get back up.” Boston staved off elimination with a 5–3 win in game five at the FleetCenter, then headed for a game six engagement at the Marine Midland Arena. “Order the chicken wings, because we’re coming!” With the Sabres producing their best effort of the postseason, however, there was no rejoicing over wings and beer. Buffalo prevailed 3–2 and took the series in six. Burns shook off the disappointment. By his yardstick, the team had measured up. “We played hard right to the buzzer. You have to be proud of those guys, and I am.”

  Sinden wasn’t, much. On the morning after playoff expulsion, the players woke up to a newspaper broadside from Sinden. With the exception of Bourque, fumed the GM, his best Bruins hadn’t been up to the task. “The coaching staff did a great job. They tried traps, they tried forechecking, they tried everything. It was a player issue.” He singled out Jason Allison (training camp holdout) and Dmitri Khristich (arbitration) for particular denunciation, which deeply upset everyone on the team. Standing up to Sinden, Allison shot back: “It seems like it’s someone different’s fault every year. How many years has it been since we got out of the first round? What has it been, 10 different coaches and 500 different players? So, it’s my fault this time, I guess. I’ll take the blame.” Khristich snorted: “Carve everybody up. That’s how it’s done.”

  Burns was not despondent—yet. But Sinden did nothing to upgrade the roster over the summer except sign Dave Andreychuk to a one-year deal. Quality guys such as Tim Taylor were allowed to flee as free agents. Boston simply walked away from Khristich’s arbitration award. Dafoe missed training camp and the first month of the 1999–2000 season, sitting at home in California while Sinden played hardball
on a new contract. Consequently, the Bruins had their worst start in thirty-five years, not recording their first win until the tenth game.

  The coach had a reputation for diminishing returns: year one was always marked by extraordinary enhancement; year two, a slight setback; year three, all-out regression seeps in. There it was again, the stigma: three-year coach with a four-year contract. “That was the book on Pat,” says Sinden. “They can take him for a year or two and then they tune out. I wouldn’t necessary say that was the case here. I wish we had been able to give him some better players.” Sinden argued more strenuously for an attack philosophy—livelier, pouncing, take it to them. Meanwhile, Burns struggled to cobble together some momentum, halt the losing, and the only way he saw of doing that was to reinforce defensive discipline. GM and coach were at counter-purposes. “I felt we should be a more aggressive, attacking team and he didn’t,” says Sinden. “I remember saying to him once, ‘Pat, I’ve seen teams play a 1–2–2 or a 2–3, but you play a 0–5. That pissed him off.” Dogmatic, Burns reiterated: “This is the way I’m going to be, whether fans like it or not. What fans want is a winning team. That’s what markets a hockey club—winning.”

  It was to be an annus horribilis, a traumatizing season for everybody, but especially for Burns and Bourque. One of them—the less likely choice—would not survive that season in Boston, would verily fling his body over the wall to escape the madness.

  A dark sense of foreboding hung over the whole outfit. Burns became more vocal in emphasizing the paltry elements he’d been given to craft a team. Then he turned around and accused the players he did have of being “mopers.” “We can’t sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. Who are we to question how they’re going to spend their money? We’re not in any position to disagree. Who am I? I’m just an employee, just a number in [the] company. I’ve spoken to Mr. Jacobs twice in my life. So it’s not up to me to decide that, and it’s certainly not up to the players. You have a job to do as a professional athlete. You’re paid to go out and perform. Go out and do it. We’ve got to quit pissing and moaning about things that have happened and get to saying, ‘Hey, we have to go forward with this.’ We have to get the passion back into the game. You can’t win without emotion, and right now it’s not there.”

  His emotions were close to the surface, apparent in an excessive—even for Burns—expletive-laced tirade following a loss to Ottawa. He erupted at Sinden when the GM attended a practice and made critical comments. “He was just going out on the ice, and I said something to him about the team,” Sinden remembers. “And he said, ‘Oh, you’re so out of date on this stuff,’ and kept walking. That just galled me. I hadn’t been coaching the team, but I’d watched every game for about thirty-five years. I was not out of date.”

  By Burns’s reckoning, he was staying the course. He refused to push the panic button and, significantly, the players expressed confidence in him. The ship righted itself temporarily, went on an excellent 9–1–2 roll, then heaved and lurched again, pounded 9–3 by Chicago. “Let’s not get too depressed,” Burns reasoned. “Let’s not be talking suicide.” Recklessly, he took another bite at management’s shin, via his roster. “I don’t care if the Lord is behind the bench and Moses is the GM. If our top line is not scoring, we can’t win.”

  At Christmas, the doomsday chorus was in viva voce with rampant speculation Burns would be pink-slipped. By December 29, Boston had won just twice in thirteen games. Sinden flew to East Rutherford with the sole purpose of stifling rumours the coach was about to walk the plank. “I was as firm as I can be to make them understand that this is not going to happen,” he told reporters. The Bs lost to Jersey anyway.

  Boston staggered into the new year, a sourpuss Burns sparring more frequently and caustically with journalists. The pattern was repeating: It’s not my fault. I can’t score goals for them. Woe is me. Then, from Buffalo, owner Jacobs twisted the dagger. “I think our team has been managed well by Harry and Mike,” he told the Boston Globe. “But our coaching has not been what I think it should be. I think our coaches need to do a better job. I don’t feel our fans are getting what they deserve. They should be getting better than what we’ve done.” Burns, appalled and offended, assailed on all sides, could hardly repudiate the owner. “I can understand Jeremy’s position. When you own a multimillion-dollar business, you can damn well criticize who you want.” It didn’t help matters that, after Jacobs had invited the entire team to dinner at his second home in West Palm Beach, one player was anonymously quoted in the Boston Herald, dripping resentment: “The guy nickel-and-dimed us, and we all get to go see how rich he is.”

  Sinden gave his coach another vote of confidence. O’Connell didn’t. The players had Burns’s back, though, turning on one of their own, Joe Murphy, when the winger lambasted his coach from the bench during a game against the Senators, belching obscenities because he’d been nailed to the pine. Murphy was suspended for “insubordination” and no teammate came to his defence. There had been previous, vehement, squabbles between Murphy and Burns in the dressing room, but the coach had never before in his career been subjected to such blatant mutiny by a player. “It had happened on the bench a couple of times,” he revealed. “I think it’s a question of respect. I think the players were having enough. I was having enough, too.” He added: “A great coach once told me, you’re a great coach when you’ve been told to F-off five times. But the sixth time, you have to do something.” Murphy was sent to no man’s land—and then to Washington.

  Following another listless loss, Burns was livid, angrily kicking a door open at the FleetCenter, slamming his office door so forcefully that the dressing room rattled. He emerged only to drag players out of the exercise room, where media isn’t allowed, ordering them back to the dressing room to face the music. “Get in there right now!” he screamed.

  By March, even Bourque—the most loyal, selfless of Bruins, five times a Norris Trophy winner—had reached the end of his rope with all the wackiness in the Hub. He requested a trade, preferably to Philadelphia. Sinden sent him to Colorado. His leave-taking, with a press conference at Logan Airport, the Bourque children tearfully watching Dad depart, was gut-wrenching and melancholy. The iconic captain had discussed his intentions with Burns. “Pat was always very respectful towards me,” says Bourque. “He recognized how I went about my business, how I worked out, how I practised, and how I played. I was forty then—not quite Pat’s age, but pretty close. I felt close to Pat as someone I could relate to. But that third year … it was not pretty. By then, it was a totally different team, all the character guys we’d lost. I didn’t think we had much to work with, trying to make the playoffs. For the most part, we went out there and worked hard, but it just wasn’t going to happen. Pat realized that, I realized that. I was always one to go to the rink with a big smile on my face, a guy that was positive. But it was tough to be positive anymore. Everybody realized, like I did at that point, there’s nothing here.” At the end of his last game as a Bruin, a 3–0 loss to Philly, Bourque collected the puck as a memento. Au revoir, Ray. (A year later, in the last game of a glorious career, Bourque and the Avalanche hoisted the Stanley Cup joyously.)

  As Bourque flew westward on a private jet, Burns rued the end of an era, but advocated team reconciliation. Wrung out from all the melodrama, he urged a ceasefire with management. “I just hope the mudslinging stops. I’ve had enough of that. I’m so tired of it—who’s at fault, what happened …” Writing about Bourque’s departure in the Herald, Michael Gee humorously observed: “The surprise was that Pat Burns didn’t climb onto a wheel strut before takeoff. The Bruins in 2000 are Saigon in 1975. The only sane destination is out.”

  Sanity, or something slightly resembling it, was restored. Sinden wasn’t exactly bolstering his coach, however. “We haven’t given up on Pat Burns. We’ll sit down at the end of the season and we’ll evaluate our situation.” Media buzzards were circling, scenting carrion. In fact, Sinden was ready to drop the guillotine as
the countdown began towards mathematical elimination from the postseason. And then he hesitated—a cynic might say from abhorrence of having to shell out Burns’s guaranteed severance. Burns, sadomasochistic maybe, made it clear he wanted to come back the next year. Faced with widespread pushback—from reporters, from fans, from season-ticket holders—Sinden relented and stayed his hand.

  “We had conversations about things changing, and I was satisfied,” he says. “But things didn’t change.” Burns had promised to eschew his suffocating trap style, allow for more creativity, be mindful of Sinden’s directives. When the season rolled around, though, the Bruins were just as static as ever, despite a couple of wins to start. Burns’s respite from termination lasted for all of eight games. A dismal road trip wrote the epitaph to his tenure as a Bruin. Boarding the return flight to Boston, he was heard softly singing, “Leavin’ on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again …”

  Sinden pulled the plug on October 25, 2000. “We were losing and we were not entertaining. We were playing the same old way. Pat was still doing it his own way, always his own way. Mike O’Connell was the guy really pushing for it. He felt we had to make a change.”

  His third year in Boston, amidst the initial flurry of firing rumours, Burns had defied convention and purchased a property—a horse ranch, minus the ponies. The spread was actually situated in New Hampshire, which made him an out-of-state-coach, though he maintained a pied-à-terre in Boston. Now he was an out-of-work coach, but he and Line didn’t sell the home. They loved the house, the secluded location. In the nearby town of Laconia, Burns held court with the media a few days after being axed, at Patrick’s Pub, natch. By then, he had the script down pat. The firing phone call, he related with a chortle, had come at 7 a.m. “That’s an early time of day to be fired.”