Coach: The Pat Burns Story (31 page)

Prior to game two, Burns enlightened the media with some stats he’d collected. According to the coach, teams that captured the second game in a septet series triumphed 75 per cent of the time. “The first win doesn’t allow us the luxury of anything. What are we supposed to think, that the series is over?”

Hardly. The ’Hawks and Belfour buckled down as the scoreless match moved into OT territory, where Todd Gill’s blast through Clark’s partial screen nearly three minutes in earned the thrilling victory. Potvin was merely spectacular, straining credulity on one airborne save, catching glove outstretched as he sailed horizontally.

But now they were facing the scary spectre of raucous Chicago Stadium for two. The Blackhawks eked out a 5–4 win in game three—Tony Amonte, guns blazing, scored four—and won the fourth 4–3 in overtime. “I’m not surprised,” Burns said. “And I’m not down.” Tripling his negatives, he added: “I’m not negative about nothin’. We’re going home. They gotta win in our rink now.” Burns accused his crew of having patted themselves on the back after taking the first two games. “Then the pat on the back turns into a kick in the ass.”

For game five, Gilmour reprised his role as playoff catalyst, inspiring the Leafs to a 1–0 triumph, though he wasn’t actually on the ice for the final result. He was brusquely upended by Gary Suter in the third period, right ankle taking his weight awkwardly. Immediately sensing something was seriously wrong, he threw stick and glove in disgust. Assisted to the dressing room—Mike Eastwood beat Belfour while Gilmour was
absent—he returned for a single power-play shift but otherwise remained on the bench as one-man cheering section.

Team officials assured Leaf Nation that Gilmour was fine. This was not remotely true. He was gobbling painkillers and limping noticeably on his twisted ankle when the squad boarded a charter for Chicago. There was doubt that Gilmour would dress for game six, though the ’Hawks weren’t buying it. “His ankle is a long ways from his heart,” said coach Darryl Sutter. X-rays allegedly showed no broken bones. “If he can walk, I know he’ll play,” said Burns. That Gilmour could skate was attributable to the two pre-game freezing injections he received. Mindful of their leader’s agony and courage, Toronto shut down the ’Hawks, playing patient, Katy-bar-the-door hockey, winning 1—0—on Gartner’s power-play poke—for the third time in the series. “I just wanted to get this thing over with,” said Gilmour. “That’s probably why I played. It made sense to take a day off, but it made more sense to win and take three or four days off instead.”

Wresting the series in six games, Toronto ensured there would never be another NHL game at Chicago Stadium. The team moved into the new United Center the next season, their beloved old arena slated for demolition. The music had been silenced.

The Leafs turned their attention to San Jose, stunning slayers of Western Conference champion Detroit. The Sharks, a third-year expansion franchise coached by Kevin Constantine, personified dull, lacklustre, soporific hockey—Toronto’s forte, actually, if one was being honest. In game one at the Gardens—chomp-chomp—the Sharks plodded their way to a 3–2 decision on Johan Garpenlov’s winner with 2:16 remaining.

“We had trouble with them all year,” Burns reminded. “We’re in it up to our knees.” Leafs were shocked to hear some of their fans booing them off the ice and pleaded for a bit of patience.

Toronto evened the series by pounding San Jose into 5–1 submission on three power-play goals and Mark Osborne’s shorthander, nicely neutralizing the “OV” Line of Igor Larionov, Sergei Markov and
Garpenlov. Taking pity on the clearly ailing Gilmour, Burns sat down his go- to knight for the second half of the third period. “We didn’t need him anymore,” he kidded. “We tossed him aside.” Now, under the playoff format adopted that year, they faced three in a row in the often-turbulent Shark Tank. The coach finger-wagged, unleashing shock-therapy Burnsian rhetoric, as if his charges were unaware of the dangers that lurked. “ ‘You might never come this close again.’ That’s what I’ve been drilling into them. I told them I can absolutely guarantee that some of them will never get a better chance at the Stanley Cup than the one they have right now. There’ll be changes on this team next year, maybe a lot of them. Who knows if any of us will get this shot again?”

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?”