Coach: The Pat Burns Story (39 page)

A dozen years behind the bench, more or less, and what did Burns have to show for it? The apogee of his career had been reached in his first year with Montreal, an eye-blink removed from cop days, and he hadn’t scaled
that playoff crest again. It ate at him. The big five-oh had come and gone. He was financially set and needn’t ever work again. But what was a healthy middle-aged man to do with the rest of his life? So scant were the opportunities, demand overwhelmed by supply, that Burns—two years on the blocks—even considered coaching U.S. college hockey. There had been one alluring job prospect when it appeared Paul Maurice was on the bubble in Carolina. Burns told friends if the ‘Canes didn’t win their game that night, he’d been lined up as replacement. But they did win, Maurice survived to be cashiered another day, and the window of opportunity slammed shut.

These were some of the matters that Lamoriello, the Meadowlands Mega-Mind, had arrived to kick around, speaking frankly in that New England “ayuh” accent, with its occluded
Rs
and dropped gerunds, a mélange of “Rhode Island, New Jersey and Quebec,” as the Devils’ czar describes it. He was in the market for a bench boss, having canned yet another, Kevin Constantine, but the Jersey franchise had quite specific requisites: the Devils
desideratum
. This was not a team in convulsions, a disaster to be overhauled, turning its imploring eyes to a miracle-working coach like Burns. No cleanup in Aisle 5. They’d won the whole enchilada two years earlier, in 2000, and had come within a game of repeating in 2001, though there was a first-round exit, passionless and punchless, from the 2002 playoffs. Jersey was rarely far from the inner circle of contenders. As a franchise, the Devils had their own way of doing things, which wasn’t flashy or histrionic. Psychologically, they were outliers, marching to a monotonous drum beat, anonymous and controversy-free. Except for their devotion to a defensive doctrine, Jersey was the antithesis of a Pat Burns club: even-keeled, almost anal.

Yet Lamoriello liked the cut of Burns’s jib, sensed there might be a mutually beneficial alignment here, if this candidate could dispel his doubts. “Pat was without question one of the best bench coaches in the game, in the way he could adjust on the fly, in what he demanded from his players. We were a team that had the talent to be a success, but we’d slipped a little. We’d felt too good about ourselves, thinking maybe we were better
than we were. We needed somebody strong to change that attitude. I said to Pat, ‘The one thing you haven’t done is you haven’t won a Stanley Cup. In my opinion, this team has a chance, but it needs a certain type of coach. And it doesn’t need, maybe, the coach that you’ve been up to now. It needs
you
to change. When I say change, not change what you know but maybe change certain things about the way you are.’ ” The way you
ahhhr
.

Burns listened and was almost too eager in trying to convince that he could reinvent himself. Lamoriello shook his head. He wasn’t getting it, this keen-to-coach fellow. “I think he was surprised at how straightforward I was. Pat was an insecure person—most people didn’t realize that. He couldn’t understand why he was in the position of not coaching. I said, ‘It’s simple: you were a coach who wore yourself out and you wore on the players. Because you get them to a point where they can have success, and then you lose them.’ He didn’t know why that happened. But it’s easy to do. It’s because when you start getting better and better, you begin to think, ‘It’s me.’ And you forget it’s the players. As soon as they recognize that you think it’s you, and
you
think it’s you, then you’re in trouble.”

Burns had never had such a conversation with a GM, someone who seemed able to look into his soul and not like everything, but not recoil either. He felt stripped, naked, and a little bit reborn. “I wanted him to look at things differently, to trust me,” Lamoriello continues. “I told him what he had to do was love his players a little more rather than show that he was tough. Tough is what you do, not what you say. And you’ve got to let the players love you back.”

Uncharacteristically, Burns divulged things, secrets he’d shared only with the most intimate of friends, unburdening. “He had scars,” says Lamoriello. “Scars don’t go away; they heal, but they don’t go away. How you live with them determines the person you become.” Lamoriello explained the ethos of his distinctive team and the “Devils way”; that he didn’t believe he had all the answers, but he had enough; that Burns could disagree when he felt there was merit, could argue as heatedly as he wished, with the general manager and the players, but there would be
no tolerance for grudges or backdoor manipulation, and no spiting of individuals that might poison the environment.

In Lamoriello’s concept of “team,” the coach was an important component, but he shouldn’t be the star and he mustn’t be a bully. “One thing about a team that has success: you have to give up your own identity. That was basically the conversation in New Hampshire. I said, ‘Pat, if you’re willing to give up your identity to bring your tools—because you do have the tools—you’ll be a hell of a coach with us. They’ll respond, these kids, because they already know how to win. They’ve won before. Right now, they need the push and the hold—you have to push them as far as you can, but never far enough that you can’t catch ’em. If you want to push them and lose them, it’s not going to work.’ ”

Lamoriello shared the wisdom of his vast experience. If things go south, he cautioned, don’t panic; that will only freak out the players. Don’t harp on what’s going wrong; emphasize what should be done to make it right. “You can’t have players worrying about what you’re thinking. When you reprimand a player, remember that you’re not reprimanding the person. You’ve got to separate the two. If you’re not happy with a guy as a player, when he gets on the bus, that doesn’t mean you don’t look at him, you don’t say good morning. You look at him. That’s what I mean about loving. If you’re talking with them in your office about hockey, don’t bring up their behaviour off the ice and say you’re a horseshit player too. When a reporter writes bad things, the worst thing in the world you can do is say something to them about it. Just look him or her in the eye and say good morning. You’re going to gain a lot more respect, and they’re going to think about it. Pat needed the same thing that he needed to give the players. He needed to be kicked in the ass and loved.”

They had probed one another, neither finding the other wanting. This will work just fine, Lamoriello concluded. “Pat, before you decide, make sure this is the job you want.” There was at least one other team making overtures that Lamoriello knew of. “It should be the Devils, but I want you to
think about what we’ve talked about here.’ It was never about contracts or money, that stuff wasn’t even an issue. It was about Pat, me, the team, and winning.”

On that June 2002 afternoon, both men oblivious of the hours passing, the sun’s rays slanting across the porch, they made a tacit covenant. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Burns embraced the “Devils way.” The night before training camp opened, he shaved off his Vandyke beard because Lamoriello didn’t allow chin hair on his team. For good measure, he even got rid of his signature moustache. Jersey’s new coach was ready to drop the mask. He took over a team that had retained the imprimatur of Jacques Lemaire, whose conservative style led the Devils to their first of two Cups at the tail end of the millennium. The club was loaded with veteran talent, had a well-stocked farm system and was anchored by the consistently brilliant goaltending of Martin Brodeur. They were getting long in the tooth on the back end, captain Scott Stevens and Ken Daneyko both thirty-eight years old. The real problem would be scoring goals, with Bobby Holik having bolted to the Rangers, Petr Sykora dealt away and Jason Arnott gone, too. This was hardly a new conundrum for Burns, however, long accused of an aversion to offence—which wasn’t strictly true. An examination of his record shows that forwards with flair, such as Doug Gilmour, had their most productive seasons under Burns. He simply demanded accountability at both ends of the ice. But there was unlikely to be defence-first grumbling from a squad nurtured on the virtues of the neutral-zone trap.

At South Mountain Arena in East Orange, Burns arrived for the first morning of training camp before 7 a.m. “I was dying for everyone to get on the ice. It’s like you’ve never missed a day. I wouldn’t call it nervous, but you’re anxious, pumped.” Mindful of Lamoriello’s advice, he was polite yet discreet with local media, unwilling to engage in typical Burnsian patter, stressing that he had evolved and adapted—somewhat—from the relentless authoritarian of olden days. “I’ve calmed down since then. I still believe in discipline. I still have that same desire to win. I’ll let players do
what they want to do, but they can only push me to a certain extreme.” There would be fewer one-on-one interviews and, Burns had resolved, no cult of the coach. No commercial endorsements, either.

Outwardly, he appeared the same, if slightly trimmer of figure and clean-shaven for the first time in twenty-seven years. He bellowed during drills (“There’s a difference between being loud and being mad”), pounded on the boards with his stick, ordered delinquents to give him ten pushups pronto and, when mistakes were committed, had all players drop flat on the ice and roll in the shavings, a weird little exercise he’d adopted way back in juniors. But this was a team on the same general wavelength as their coach: defensive-zone coverage, neutral-zone pressure and offence when chances permitted.

Brodeur, then as now the cornerstone of the franchise, had known Burns only peripherally. He’d been a kid and Canadiens fans when Burns coached Montreal, accompanying his photographer father to the rink, and had later listened to Burns’s hockey commentary on radio and TV. “When he took the job in New Jersey, I didn’t know him, but I knew him, you know? And he turned out to be exactly as he appeared—a pretty adamant guy and not two-faced. Pat is Pat. By watching him coach, the way he spoke, such a confident person, it made you feel good.”

Brodeur recalls their shared passion for motorcycles. “He’s the one who came with me when I picked up my first bike. He took me to the dealership and rolled along beside me when we left because it was the first time I was riding it.” Burns, no idiot, quickly made an ally of Brodeur. Sometimes, when he thought the team was veering towards complacency and needed a smack upside the head, he’d give Brodeur advance warning—watch this—then arrange his face into boot-camp sergeant demeanour. “One day, we were sitting, just talking, and Pat says, ‘Go sit down—I’ve got to snap at the team now.’ So he comes into the dressing room and he throws the Gatorade bottle down, starts breaking sticks. Oh my God, it was funny. Then he looks at me, like, ‘How was that?’ ”

Mostly, Brodeur was impressed by how smoothly Burns blended into the Devils culture. “Coming into our organization, well, Lou’s not the
easiest guy to deal with. Pat didn’t feel threatened being around someone who had that much power. So, as players, we didn’t have to feel threatened about the big guy; we just had to worry about pleasing our coach. We kind of forgot about Lou overlooking everything with his eagle eye. Pat was the boss. New Jersey is different from other places in the league, with the way Lou does things.

“Pat got there and he definitely had to clean himself up, shave the goatee, cut his hair.” Brodeur chuckles. “That was probably the hardest thing for Pat, because he didn’t look like a biker anymore. But he embraced it. He became one of us.”

Burns debuted his thirteenth season as an NHL head coach with a road win over Ottawa and another against the Columbus Blue Jackets at home. At every turn, Burns avoided talking about himself. His postgame press conferences were terse, two-minute affairs. The only controversy erupted when head case Mike Danton was sent back to Jersey from a road trip after he’d offered candid comments to a newspaper about his limited ice time, and that was a Lamoriello decision. Burns had banned Danton’s odious agent, David Frost, from practices. (Years later, during Frost’s trial on charges of sexual exploitation, Burns was revolted that the decertified agent and former junior coach had compared himself to Burns.)

The Devils won six of seven in early October and boasted the league’s stingiest defence, but attendance at Continental Airlines Arena was abysmal, the venue often less than half full. “I looked up, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of people,” Burns noted. “For a 6–1 team, that was surprising.”

Through their first twenty-five games, Jersey had a 15–7–1–2 record, winning eleven of those in matches decided by one goal. They held down first place in the Atlantic Division. Yet Burns was steadfastly dour, casting his withering gaze from behind the bench. “Don’t judge me by my bad mood,” he attempted to explain. “I’m not a pleasant person to be around. You probably wouldn’t like to be my friend.”

His mood fluctuations, which ran the gamut from A to B, amused Brodeur. “He’d come in with the hat pulled down over his forehead and this expression on his face, you’d know—‘Oops, he’s pissed, practice is going to be hard today.’ Other days he’d be happy, so we were happy.” Either way, all the players were attentive to Burns’s instructions. “He wasn’t a technician, it was more raw than that,” analyzes Brodeur. “He’d say, ‘This is what we’ve got to work on.’ Lemaire was a coach who could pinpoint something on the ice like it was a carpet, tell us, ‘Listen, this is where you need to stand.’ With Pat, it was like, ‘Uh, stand right around there somewhere.’ His approach made everybody feel comfortable, like we didn’t have to be on our toes all the time.” One morning, amidst a practice tirade, Burns got so wound up that he forgot the name of his backup netminder, Corey Schwab, sputtering: “You! Goaltender! Get in the net!” That cracked everybody up.

Burns then made news when he took a verbal shot at Glen Sather, the Rangers GM who’d given him no more than a courtesy callback when seeking a new coach. The Manhattan team that garnered all the ink had missed the playoffs in five consecutive years. “The Devils have high standards. That’s the difference,” sniffed Burns. “We have a standard to live up to every year, and a couple of teams in our area don’t have the standards we do.”