“The Bruins in 2000 are Saigon in 1975.”
IN THE BOSTON DRESSING ROOM, the two men eye each other intently. Harry Sinden is looking for a coach and Pat Burns is looking for a job. The applicant is indisputably qualified, yet Sinden feels a tug of unease. There is so much conflicting history, vivid scars from old wars. Sinden has to ask: “Pat, you were a Montreal Canadien. I’m having a tough time believing you could ever be a Bruin. Can you? Can you be a Bruin?” When Burns answers, Sinden studies his body language carefully. “If I’m on this team, Harry, I’ll be the best Bruin you’ve got.”
Says Sinden: “He convinced me.”
Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. Tie Domi and Belinda Stronach. Charles and Diana. Odd couples that just didn’t fit together, doomed from the moment their orbits collided. Add to that list the dominant-male-on-dominant-male pairing of Sinden and Burns. Not because they had so little in common, but probably because they were so much alike temperamentally: volatile, and thus destined to trigger each other’s firing pins. Immovable object, meet irresistible force. Sinden was president and general manager of the Boston Bruins, penny-pinching feudal lord of all that he surveyed on Causeway Street, especially with a majority owner, Jeremy Jacobs, who preferred living in Buffalo. Forever mythologized as the skipper who led Team Canada to victory over the Soviets in the ’72 Summit Series, Sinden never quite shed his coaching skin. Whoever prowled behind the Bruins bench would have Sinden peering over his shoulder as meddler and quibbler. The man couldn’t help it.
Mike Milbury, prototypical Bruin and no trembling faint-heart, tells a story. “I’m coaching my first year in Boston and we get to the All-Star break, two games left to play. We play in Hartford, win that game, now we have one left before a four-day weekend, and we’re in first place overall. It’s my first year coaching and I’m feeling pretty good about myself. We get back to Boston at one o’clock in the morning. I call off the morning skate for the next day, but I go in to look at some tape. I get a call from Harry: ‘Come up and see me in my office.’ So I walk in, first place, won the night before, nothing really to worry about. I sit down and Harry says, ‘You fucking think it’s over, Mike? You think the break has fucking started, don’t ya? You think you’re gonna come in here tonight and win this fucking game, two points, but you’re on vacation already, just like the rest of these fucking guys.’ I was sweating bullets. I left, came back at five o’clock, locked the dressing room door, kicked over chairs, screamed at everybody. And wouldn’t you know it—that was one of the best regular-season games we had all year. See, one of Harry’s favourite expressions was, ‘Hockey isn’t like bridge; you can’t pass. You have to show up and play.’ He was an outstanding coach. But he came in talking like a guy who had coached a Stanley Cup championship team and a guy who had coached the Canadian national team over the Russians in 1972. Harry was demanding on his coaches because he felt—and with good reason—that he knew the right approach to coaching. And Pat Burns was not one to shy away from a confrontation, either. He did not have, shall we say, a politically correct nature.”
That they joined forces in 1997 took hockey people aback. “It would have been unthinkable forty years earlier,” says Serge Savard, recalling the playoff-driven hatred between Montreal and Boston that all but precluded coaching in one franchise and then the other, even with a Toronto stop-off in between. “I don’t know why Pat went to Boston,” says Cliff Fletcher, shaking his head. “It was ridiculous what happened there.”
There was no mystery to it. Burns was a supplicant, driven to distraction after spending an entire season on the sidelines, with his thumbs up his arse. After getting the hook in Toronto, he’d retreated to Magog, content to sit tight for a while, thoroughly anticipating that job offers would be plentiful over the summer. It appeared likely there would be vacancies in San Jose and Vancouver, to name just a couple of possible destinations. To keep himself occupied in the interim, Burns accepted a six-week contract to provide daily hockey commentary on a Montreal French radio station, CKAC, during the playoffs. He also leapt at a short-term gig to express his thoughts in English during intermissions of first-round playoff games for The Sports Network. Encroaching a tad on Don Cherry’s domain as king of the two-cent coach’s corner opinion, these rhetorical sessions provided a nice temporary focus for Burns’s energies and kept him in the loop. To his own bemusement—because he’d crossed over, however fleetingly, to the media dark side—the unemployed coach proved adroit at extemporizing and opinionating. The time-filler cameos expanded so that eventually Burns was making use of his vocal cords on several AM stations. “You can do radio with your hair messed up,” he snickered. “You can be lying on your couch with a beer.” Radio also led to his encounter with a divorced mother of two adolescent children, Line Cignac, who was working in promotions. Burns fell head over heels. “I’ve met someone,” he told close friend Kevin Dixon.
Where real hockey was concerned, Burns thought he had the luxury of being choosy, cheques still coming in from that one-year-outstanding Toronto salary. Perhaps vainly, he considered himself a hot commodity. Surely another club would come knocking? As the months flew by, however, GMs were not beating a path to his door in the Eastern Townships. He started to squirm. “What happens if the phone never rings? What happens if no one wants you?” When the next season got under way, Burns wrung his hands over maybe being yesterday’s man. He had to accept the fact that his road back to the NHL now depended on some other poor coaching fraternity mook getting canned.
There are always in-season firings. Perplexingly, overtures to Burns were more of the just-looking, not-buying variety. In February, he popped up in Toronto to promote a new line of snowmobiles and provided sound bites for the local press contingent, refraining from making any negative remarks about the chaotic Leaf franchise. “Brother, do I miss hockey, the scrap and challenge of it? I can’t wait to get back at it, and I will, but only if the situation is right.” In fact, Burns was regularly on the blower, urging his agent-cousin Robin Burns to shop his services around at any whiff of an opening. As a between-periods commentator for Montreal’s RDS game broadcasts, he kept himself close to the franchise where his NHL career had sprouted. When the Habs were ushered out of the playoffs by New Jersey in five first-round games and sophomore coach Mario Tremblay was given the heave-ho, Burns expressed interest, with reservations. “I’d have to think about it. I want to coach again in the NHL, but do I want to coach here? I’m on television now; I’m nice and popular. You become the coach, you become a target.”
Quietly, he did throw his hat in the ring, formalizing his candidacy. Simultaneously, other vacancies arose—Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Jose and, most enticingly, Boston. The Bruins, finishing dead last in the NHL and missing the playoffs for the first time in three decades, had fired phlegmatic coach Steve Kasper. Another Original Six team, however currently sad-sack, had Burns licking his lips. But he was not Sinden’s first choice. The GM was wooing Boston University’s Jack Parker, the most highly regarded coach in the U.S. college ranks. Only when Parker rebuffed the offer did Sinden turn his beady eyes towards Plan B—Burns, who was on his way back from a Florida vacation when Sinden invited him in for a feeler chat.
“Pat reminded me a lot of a couple of coaches that I’d had—I’m referring to Don Cherry and Mike Milbury—in his attitude, his demeanour, his personality,” says Sinden, recalling that long meeting in May 1997 that took place in the Bruins dressing room, assistant GM Mike O’Connell also present. “He wasn’t a tactician or strategy guy as they were, but I thought Pat had handled his teams the same way. His background was similar to mine. He grew up in the city streets and had been a cop; I was a guy who’d worked at General Motors. It seemed to me that he would be a good fit for us. I just had this feeling that he could be a Bruin.”
Burns later recounted that interview conversation to his pal Chris Wood, who was flabbergasted at the career choice. “He called me up and said, ‘Woody, I’m going to BAWWSTON.’ I told him, ‘Listen, I was a big Montreal fan and I became a Toronto fan because of you. But the Boston Bruins? Love you buddy, but no way can I be a Bruins fan.’ And Pat chuckled, ‘You know, Woody, neither can I.’ But, honestly, why wouldn’t he have gone to Boston? It had been a long period between Toronto and the Bruins’ offer. All coaches second-guess themselves, worry about never getting another job. I don’t think Pat had any other serious offers. And it was a lucrative deal for him, his first (almost) million-dollar contract. But Harry turned out to be a tyrant.”
Others tried to dissuade Burns as well: Get a grip, Pat. This is so not smart. He pooh-poohed the negative advice.
For the interview, he arrived in Boston with Robin Burns and Kevin Dixon. Robin, former NHL journeyman and successful entrepreneur—his hockey equipment company, Itech, became third largest in its specialty—had taken over from Don Meehan when rule changes prohibited agents from representing both coaches and players. “Harry had put us at a hotel on the other side of town. Pat signed in as Patrick Jonathan. We were really being hidden away. I guess Harry didn’t want people to know that he was talking to us. But the first guy we run into in the lobby goes, ‘Hey, Burnsie, you here to sign with the Bruins?’ Big secret.”
Burns enjoyed a degree of celebrity in New England, at least among those who followed the game. Dropping into a Lake Placid bar during his sabbatical from coaching, a ballsy waitress once beseeched Burns to autograph her bra. “So he signed, right on the hooter,” Robin laughs.
Following the discussion with Sinden, the Burnses and Dixon retired to their hotel suite and promptly got pie-eyed. Dixon dipped into Burns’s bag, removed all the underwear, soaked the skivvies in water and tossed them out the window. “Pat’s yelling at us—‘You fuckers! You better have kept a pair for me to wear tomorrow!’ ” It was Robin who hammered out the contract details. “I told Pat, ‘We’re going after four years because Harry will fire you after three.’ ” Burns pulled a face. “I’m not going to be fired.” Robin warned: “Listen, Pat, I’m telling you the truth. Harry will fire you.” So Robin Burns pushed for that deal and got it, with seasonal raises that brought the contract to $950,000 in the fourth year. “I knew Harry didn’t want to break the million-dollar barrier, psychologically. But we had what we wanted. And that first year in Boston for Pat was … magical.”
In Boston, Burns was no longer the son of a French-Canadian mother but the son of an Irish father, his cop cred the cherry on top. What could be more seductive for Beantown, with its romanticized Irish working-class ethos and police-shield stock characters? At his introductory press conference—held a week after Slick Rick Pitino was anointed Celtics coach and Svengali—Burns even revised that off-told childhood anecdote about crying over the Chicago Blackhawks sweater a relative had bought him. Now it was a Boston Bruins jersey with Johnny Bucyk’s name on the back. “This was when Rocket Richard, Montreal’s No. 9, was the hottest thing since sliced bread,” he told a local media corps instantly charmed. “I had to fight my way on the ice, off the ice, and all the way home. But it was mine.” Whatever. He went so far as referring to his off-season home “in Vermont.” Magog hadn’t moved across the border, but Lake Memphremagog did dip partway into the U.S. state.
With his four-year pact, Burns became only the second man (Dick Irvin the other) to lead half of the NHL’s six traditional teams. In a city of dynamic Big Coaches, Burns could more than hold his own. He affixed a black-and-gold Bs licence plate to his Chevy 4×4 and slapped a Bruins sticker on the side of his Harley. Red Sox pitching ace Roger Clemens had just defected for Toronto. It was only fair that Boston got charismatic Burns as compensation.
Pshaw, Burns scoffed to media queries that he might come to grief with the club president. “Everybody is afraid of the myth of Harry Sinden. Harry Sinden believes in one thing: being loyal to a team and winning. He’s an old-school guy, and I like that. I think it’s important to be loyal. Don’t you think it’s about time we started getting back to that?” Sure, he was schmoozing the boss, but Sinden was glowingly approving in this first-trimester phase of their relationship. The notoriously skinflint Bruins organization had assured Burns they’d loosen the purse strings and sign quality talent. Sinden was agreeable when his coach quickly reached out to Dave Ellett, a favourite from Toronto days. Ellett was a free agent. “It was the first call I got, Pat phoning me directly. He said, ‘I want you here—what’s it going to take?’ I was nervous about going to Boston. The organization had a bad reputation and my agent tried to talk me out of it. But I had discussions with Pat and he assured me that things had changed there.” Ellett became a Bruin. Then Burns coaxed Ken Baumgartner—enforcer with the face of a damaged angel and part-time MBA student—into the Boston fold. “You guys are gonna love the Bomber!” he crowed to reporters.
The Bruins had just come off a ghastly season in which they’d committed the double crime of being both bad and boring. In Burns, Sinden had banked on a persona who would help fill the seats at the new FleetCenter and staunch the bleed of bailing season-ticket holders. A high-profile coach was part of the blueprint to rebuild the franchise. The other pillar of Bruin rejuvenation was a seventeen-year-old by the name of Joe Thornton, Boston’s salve for finishing last in the then-twenty-six-team NHL. The six-foot-four-inch teenager was the first-overall selection in the entry draft and the most highly touted hope since Bobby Orr. With their second pick, eighth overall, the Bruins took Russian mini-bull Sergei Samsonov. “I patted him on the shoulder,” marvelled Burns. “It was like patting a rock.”
So, the Bruins had legendary defenceman Raymond Bourque, a couple of projected stars who could just as easily flame out, and a bunch of other guys Burns admitted he’d never heard of. Assembling his new charges at training camp, a chaw of tobacco shoved beneath his upper lip, the coach declared, “Unless you’re Raymond Bourque, I don’t know you.” As an aside, he added: “I have ties and underwear older than some of those guys out there.”
Rapped as a coach who cleaved to veterans and couldn’t manage youngsters well—as if he’d never developed kids in juniors who stepped directly into the NHL—Burns pledged to be patient with his fledglings and balance sternness with praise. There was no doubt at camp that he had his players’ attention. They were obedient and energetic, glad to have someone in charge who brought structure to their game plan, even though Burns could never be described as someone who excelled at Xs-and-Os instruction. As one columnist observed, “Burns is the kind of coach, who, when he senses a lull, refers to the front and back cover of his playbook; either side will suffice when used for hitting someone upside the head.”
Burns was insistent, however, on bringing “Jumbo Joe” Thornton along slowly, with baby steps. “I will not make the same mistakes some teams do with their number-one draft choices.” But he forgot who was really calling the shots. Here was sown the seed of his initial contretemps with Sinden. For the same reason Sinden had peeled open Boston’s clammy wallet to pay Burns, he wanted full bang for his multimillion-bucks investment in Thornton. Just eighteen now, the curly-haired youth would put fannies in the seats and surely provide goal production spark. Burns wanted him to ripen in the minors. “Is it better to keep him here and not play him?” Burns asked, making his case in the media. “Or is it better that he go down, play in the World Junior tournament? We’ll all have to sit down, management and the coaching staff, list all the fors and againsts. What’s the best and proper decision for Joe Thornton?” Coach and GM argued heatedly about it, but this wasn’t a battle Burns could possibly win. “We had this big stud, number-one pick,” says Sinden. “He was the next Eric Lindros in everybody’s mind. Pat looked at him and said, ‘He’s not ready.’ But I felt that we couldn’t send this kid down.” The kid broke his arm in an exhibition game, slashed by Pittsburgh’s Stu Barnes, so that deferred the issue for a bit. But he was in the lineup by game four of the regular season. Sinden—and his assistant, O’Connell, who concurred—could foist the youngster on Burns, but the coach controlled Thornton’s ice time. Turning a deaf ear to Sinden, he eased the youth in gently, usually deployed on the fourth line, occasionally scratched entirely, such that, by his twenty-first NHL game, Thornton didn’t have a single point. This was not going to earn the putative Boston saviour rookie-of-the-year laurels. “We kept him here but he didn’t play much,” says Sinden, reflecting on poor choices. “He was ready in some ways, but Joe was still a kid. Some of them come in at eighteen and they’re fairly mature. Joe wasn’t.” With the wisdom of hindsight, Sinden concedes that Burns was on the button. “Pat was right on that one.” It was Samsonov, with a year in the International Hockey League under his belt, who provided the buzz that year—and copped the rookie award at its conclusion.
The ’97–98 Bruins came charging out of the gate, Burns, as was his forte, squeezing the most out of marginal players. “Pat’s strength was that he got everyone in their right roles,” says O’Connell. “It’s really what he does best—gets people to become a team. He motivates each player to perform his role for the betterment of the team.” It was big-yawn hockey, rigid and risk averse, but, in the coach’s defence, he didn’t have much to work with, and defence could be taught. A newspaper cartoon depicted Burns hypnotizing fans by dangling a puck like a watch fob. Queried about the merits of “The Trap,” dead-zone hockey, he got his back up. “We had to give it a name, that’s the worst thing we ever did. The positional play you’re talking about? We don’t play the trap. We play a positional game, and that has been going on for twenty-five years.”
O’Connell fails to see the difference, as practised by Burns, while acknowledging management had known exactly what they were getting. “It was a trap mentality. Pat liked big, bruising guys but his was not a style that forced the issue. It was more of a classic ‘let’s wait, get in our position, and wait, and wait, and then we counter.’ He’d done that everywhere he’d been. The trap was developed in the Montreal system, and that was Pat’s belief. Everybody knew he was going to do it, but still, he was very good at getting them to do it, better than anyone else. And we won playing that style. Some of his ideas you might not agree with, but it’s a very successful way of playing which many teams have adopted. It does enable teams without talent to win. It gives them a chance because of how it’s structured. The NHL today, the way I look at it, there’s five not-so-good teams and the other twenty-five are about the same.”
On New Year’s Eve 1997, Boston tied the Leafs 2–2 in Toronto, the first time Burns had graced the Gardens since packing hastily in the night. The Bruins were 17–17–7, vastly improved from the squad that had finished in the cellar eight months earlier. Their hockey may have been wincingly dull, but it was adequately effective because players had bought into the coach’s vision. At the All-Star break, they ranked a solid sixth in the Eastern Conference, light years removed from the pitiful lot that brought Burns in as Original Six fix-it man. The postseason beckoned again. “You want to get to that ‘Spring Dance,’ ” Burns enthused, “you’d better bring your Kodiak work boots and not your patent-leather shoes.” A 4–1 win over the Islanders clinched the playoff berth on April 9, and Burns’s name was touted once more for a Jack Adams award.
“The best coaches are the ones that keep people on their toes, keep players honest in terms of knowing what’s expected of them,” says Ray Bourque. “Pat made what was expected of us very clear from the beginning. He was a coach I learned a lot from. I’d never realized how detailed he was as a coach. This was a guy who believed you had to play defence—not just defencemen but centres and wingers too. He kept harping on it, and that’s how his drills were set up. These are the drills I’ve brought along with me, coaching my sons’ teams, and if I were ever to coach in the NHL—not that I would—the drills I would use. We practised them two or three times a week. Every single forward knew exactly what he had to do in the defensive zone. We were very, very well coached.”
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.”
Without acrimony, apparently devoid of anger, Burns laid out his case: he did try to adapt, he wasn’t a one-dimensional coach and he had heeded Sinden. “Harry’s an original.” And no, of course he was not done coaching yet. “I’m just a simple guy, trying to get through life. I want to go down the road with as few problems as I can. This is just a bump in that road.”
The evening before, Burns had watched the Bruins on TV beating the Washington Capitals 4–1. They were coached by his good pal Mike Keenan, a handy hire for Sinden because Iron Mike lived in Boston. Burns insisted that Keenan stepping into his shoes would not affect their friendship. Cousin Robin Burns says different. “He was hurt.”
A week later, Sinden fired himself as general manager, bowing out to his protégé O’Connell, but keeping his president title. He was still, in effect, the boss. By the spring of 2012, O’Connell was long gone and Sinden still had an executive office as “senior advisor to the owner of the Boston Bruins.” Reminiscing about the banishment of Burns, there’s a hint of regret in his voice.
“I’ve got to say, there was probably some compulsion on my part. Sometimes, you make these moves compulsively, and when you look back, you think maybe you should have given it more time. You question yourself afterwards. That might have been the case with Pat. But we gave him a good shot.”
Mike Keenan was released at the end of the 2000–01 season.