| Friday, November 3
By Nancy Marrapese-Burrell
Special to ESPN.com |
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Back on Oct. 30, the Boston Bruins were just beginning to climb out
of the Eastern Conference cellar after an 0-5-4 start. They were facing the Buffalo Sabres at the FleetCenter and coach Pat Burns ran into Sabres coach Lindy Ruff, whose Stanley Cup-finalist club was rebounding from a bad start of its own -- 0-5-2.
|  | | Dafoe's slow start after holdout has hampered the Bruins. |
"I can still remember seeing Pat in the hallway," said Ruff. "I said,
'How's it going?' and he said, 'It's a lot better now than it was a couple of weeks ago' and I kind of said the same.
"It's a funny game," Ruff continued. "When you're winning, you don't ever think you're going to lose. But when you start losing,
you wonder when you're going to win. If one thing doesn't work, it seems like
another thing falls apart on you. You get that corrected and something else
goes."
Last season, both coaches were the toast of their respective towns. Ruff
led the underdog Sabres to an inspired playoff run including just the second
finals appearance in club history. Burns was molding a young squad, which
eventually lost to Buffalo in the second round of the postseason, into what many
predicted would be a Cup contender.
What a difference a few months make. Burns, in his third year behind
the Boston bench, was rumored by one Boston Globe columnist to be in danger
of losing his job. Ruff, also in his third year, has had to weather holdouts, injuries to key players and inconsistency.
Welcome to the world of the professional coach, perhaps the most
thankless position there is. A check of the standings on Jan. 13 shows
that if the postseason were to begin that day, both the Sabres and Bruins
would be on the outside looking in.
Former Winnipeg Jets and Washington Capitals head coach Tom McVie, a former assistant coach in Boston and now a member of the Bruins'
scouting staff, used to say that in order to be a great coach you had to get
great players.
For all the struggles of Burns and Ruff, it's not as if they've suddenly
lost whatever it was that made them successful in the past.
"Yeah," said Burns, sarcastically, "we get dumb overnight. That's the
feeling and that's the perception. If you have some success and if the team
all of a sudden doesn't have success, the coach has forgotten (how to coach).
That's the easy thing to do. That's the way it will always be."
The third year seems to be a lightning rod for controversy.
Kevin Constantine was in his third year with the Penguins when he was
gassed. That followed three years as head coach in San Jose. Marc Crawford
made it through three seasons in Colorado and won one Stanley Cup before
being shown the door.
In the case of Boston and Buffalo, there are a myriad of reasons why
these two clubs are below .500. Buffalo, which went into camp with a number
of key players embroiled in contract squabbles, doesn't have the best
goaltender in the world because Dominik Hasek is injured.
The Bruins didn't have several players in training camp -- also because of
contract problems. The most important was goalie Byron Dafoe, a Vezina Trophy finalist last season. Add to that Jason Allison's injuries to
his right wrist and left thumb that put him out for the season and it has been
an uphill battle.
Ruff said he has a lot of empathy for what Burns is going
through.
"You have to have a lot of things going for you to get where any team
has got," said Ruff. "I think in our case, we stayed healthy for most of
the year last year. We lost Hasek for a good period of time but played a game
over .500 last year which allowed us to sneak into the playoffs at the very
end after playing very well for the first half.
"There are a lot of things that can go wrong. In Pat's case, his leading player has been hurt almost all
season long. He was playing with a bad arm and a bad hand and now he's lost
him for the rest of the year. He had a goaltender who wasn't around for the
first couple of months and I think he's paying the price for that. These are
all things that are out of his control. As a coach, you've got to work your
way around it."
Burns, who has been using a number of players from the Bruins' top AHL
affiliate in Providence to offset the injuries, said it's been a frustrating
run. The skid reached 3-12-6 in the 21 games since Thanksgiving following
Thursday's 0-0 overtime tie with the Sabres.
"There was one time in the world where we thought we could never lose
any hockey games," said Burns. "Right now, we're wondering if we're going
to have a win before Groundhog Day. If we don't have one, we'd better go back
in the hole, never mind our shadow. I'm just kidding here."
The Sabres' and Bruins' goalie woes are in some ways parallel. Dafoe hasn't been the
player he was last season because of missing so much time and he hasn't been
stealing games for Boston the way he did last year. Hasek can't steal any
games because he's not even playing.
"In some sense, it was tough to start the year with five players who
were unsigned and missed training camp," said Ruff. "Along with Hasek
missing three quarters of training camp, we started the year without Curtis
Brown, Vaclav Varada, Miroslav Satan, Jay McKee, Rhett Warrener, Hasek and
Alexei Zhitnik was hurt. We didn't win for the first seven games. That kind
of put us behind the eight-ball. We fought our way back to .500 a couple of
times only to drop off but there are a lot of different factors that have
gone into where we are now.
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When you're not playing well in back-to-back games, maybe for a third
game in succession, Dom was the guy who stepped in and won a game by himself.
I think that's what your star players do for you, they take control of games,
they win them for you, they get the ship righted for you again. They plug all
the leaks and all of a sudden, you're going in the right direction.
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Sabres coach Lindy Ruff
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"When you're not playing well in back-to-back games, maybe for a third
game in succession, Dom was the guy who stepped in and won a game by himself.
I think that's what your star players do for you, they take control of games,
they win them for you, they get the ship righted for you again. They plug all
the leaks and all of a sudden, you're going in the right direction."
Since Thanksgiving, the Bruins clearly have been headed in the wrong
direction. Burns said it's not as if he's enjoying the pressure-packed
situation -- or the inevitable second-guessing outside the club that goes with it.
"I hear people who will say, 'Get 'em going,' or 'Do something,' "
said Burns, shaking his head in disbelief. "Like I'm not doing anything.
Like I love this losing here, I just feel good in it. You hear 'Get 'em
going,' or 'Turn it up.' If it were that easy, we'd have been out of this
slump a long time ago."
There's a cliché in sports about how players, after too much time with
the same coach, tune him out. After a certain period of time, the message no
longer gets through. Burns said he thinks that notion is as erroneous as it
is ridiculous.
"It's easy to say the players have turned it off but they don't like
losing either," said Burns. "I don't care how much they would dislike a
coach, I don't think there's a player in this room who likes to lose. I don't
think any professional athlete likes to lose. I think players turning (off the coach) is another fictitious excuse that we seem to want to use. Some
players will use it because they're in a slump or some players aren't playing
well. It's the easiest thing to do. You see it after a coach has been let go,
they'll win one or two games and they'll say it's because of the (new) guy."
Burns has been coaching in the NHL since the 1988-89 season, first at the helm in Montreal. From there he went to Toronto before going
to Boston. He's learned a great deal in his tenure with three of the Original
Six franchises and he said he finds it amazing that anyone thinks he can't
adapt to the times. Hockey is still hockey. And at 47, Burns believes he has
a great more to give.
"I hear a lot of people say the game has changed," he said. "Christ,
I'm not a dinosaur. I hear all this stuff. The game hasn't changed that much,
the athletes have changed, the team has changed. A lot of things have changed
but I don't think the game has changed that much. It all comes down to skill,
heart and dedication. There's been adapting to do and I've adapted. I've
coached for 11-12 years in professional hockey. It's not as if I'm doing the
same things I did my first year but they make you feel like a dinosaur."
Nancy Marrapese-Burrell of the Boston Globe writes a weekly national NHL column that appears on Fridays.
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