(On Monday, NHL coaching great Pat Burns, who died of cancer in 2010, will be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, where one of his favourite players, Doug Gilmour, was enshrined in 2011.)

He could be intimidating but also a gentle giant. That was the other side of Pat that most people never saw. There was so much more to him than the guy who was always glowering behind the bench. He had that look, of course. The Look, we called it, and he could scare you. There were times when he turned The Look on me too. Oh yeah, he was fierce. But he was also someone you could sit down with and talk to. He had a lot of passion for his players. That’s what we loved about him.

I’d played against his team, Montreal, in the 1989 final, and he’d been around the league for a while. But the first time I really met Pat was when he signed in Toronto. He called me up and we went out for a few beers. He told me right up front: “You’ve got to be the hardest working guy on the team, in every game.” The biggest thing with Pat was that he wanted to win. Well, everybody wants to win but that was his main focus right off the hop coming in with the Leafs. His teams were never going to be outworked and he wanted everyone to be on the same page. He had expectations for all of us and he made those clear.

Right from the start, we understood each other, me and Pat. We were in this together. There would be a time and a place to have fun but most importantly he was very serious about putting in the work. He preached conditioning to everybody. I got pre-warned. “Make sure you’re in shape when you come to camp, Dougie.” And he kept communicating that message throughout the summer. The phone would ring and it would be Pat: “You in shape? You in shape?” Yes Pat, I’m in shape. Yes Pat, I’m working out.

The thing was, everybody bought in right away and believed in what he was doing.

It’s true that he treated some players differently. I think you have to. Some guys that don’t play a lot, you’ve got to push them more sometimes. He pushed them to make sure they’d be able to step in if somebody got hurt. He could be hard. The main thing is that everybody accepted their roles. That doesn’t always happen on a team.







Pat would constantly switch up the lines to get the team going. I could start a game playing with Dave Andreychuk and Glenn Anderson and end it playing with Wendel Clark and Nik Borschevsky. Pat was always thinking, always adjusting. He was on top of every period, evaluating us, what was working and what wasn’t. He’d sit in his office between periods studying systems. Then he’d come in to the dressing room and say: “Okay, this is what we’re going to do now.”

I guess a lot of people thought I was a Pat favourite. I hope I was. But if he was unhappy with my play he let me know. There were a few nights when he nailed me to the bench, too. Like, some guys are always going to be a little more creative than others. Pat was fine with that. But he had a rule: In the first two or the last two minutes of a period, never lose the puck at the blue line. I remember this one time I lost the puck at the blue line early in the game, they came down and scored. And I didn’t see the ice again until the next period. He brought me in and said: “How am I going to tell my second- and third- and fourth-line guys that they have to pay the price for stupid mistakes if I treat you differently? You’re the guy they follow.” I understood.

Pat was almost like an actor. He had played all these different roles in his own life. He’d been a cop and he had a certain intuition, I think, about people. He could be the tough guy and the funny guy and the serious guy and the emotional guy. Pat was just real smart about hockey. He had so many ideas and he could feel the pulse of a game. The biggest thing I learned from him was, not only on the teaching side, but being easy on your players when you’re losing and being hard on them when they’re winning. Some nights you just found a way to win even if you didn’t play that well. Or if you were in a drought, hadn’t won in four, five, six games, he’d loosen up on you.

Pat had his own way of doing things. Like at the morning skate on game day, if we weren’t quite going the way he wanted us to, he’d say, “Okay, you guys know what you’re doing, right? You’ve got everybody fooled. You guys think you’re ready, eh? We’ll just see how it goes tonight.” Then of course we’d put pressure on ourselves, go out there and stink out the place in the first period. So he’d come into the dressing room: “I told you so. Now are you going to listen to me?” He was very aware of how he felt we were going to play before the puck even dropped.

Pat did enjoy pulling pranks on players. There was one time in Montreal when he got some fingerprint dust and smeared it all over the headband inside Patrick Roy’s mask at practice. When Roy started sweating, his whole face went blue and stayed that way for three or four days. We were always pulling tricks on each other. I never got tired of putting pin-prick holes in his paper coffee cup. I usually tried to do that before games, when he had his suit on. You know how much care Pat took with the way he looked.

There’s that picture of us from NHL awards night his first year in Toronto. I’d won the Frank Selke Trophy and he’d won coach of the year. Me with my big hair and my bow tie. He looked real good that night. Pat always made spent a lot of time on his hair so it wasn’t just me. He autographed a bunch of those photos for me, to donate for charity and stuff. I still have about 10 of them. I found them recently in the closet at the cottage.

We had that great run in the ’93 playoffs that everybody remembers. People forget that we won the first 10 games to start the next season. I really thought, here we go again, all the excitement, and we did get to the semis against Vancouver. After that came the lockout year and a bunch of trades. Wendel was gone, Bob Rouse, Sylvain Lefebvre, Jamie Macoun left not much later. A lot of things changed.

Pat phoned me the night he was fired, phoned a few of the guys. As a player, you really hate to see that. It’s almost like it’s partly your fault. For him, at the time, it was, yup, I need a mental break right now, start over again later. And he did. Took the time that he needed and enjoyed his off-ice activities. He loved his Harley and playing his guitar and hanging with the Good Brothers, just getting away from the game for a while.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

I’ve heard people say Pat wouldn’t be able to coach in today’s NHL. That’s just not true. He was always changing, adapting to the game. Dave Ellett played for him in Boston. I asked him, is Pat still really hard on the guys? He said, nope, totally different, real easy-going.

The Hall of Fame induction is going to be very emotional. It would have been awesome for him to be there. But it’s going to be a special night for his wife, Line, and his son Jason, to accept the induction on Pat’s behalf.

I have so many memories of Pat. Great memories.