I remember the year being 1988 and living in the Passage and news came on that my Habs had hired an ex-cop as their coach..i remember being very impressed with this guy..how emotionally involved he would get within the games themselves, the stories that he threw an ashtray at Claude Lemieux and or would not send the trainers out on the ice when Claude was faking another injury...how that first season the Habs came to within two games of the Stanley Cup only to lose to the Flames, which in retrospect did give a feel good moment to the fans when Lanny won the Cup...
A few years later Mr Burns left the Habs and went to the dreaded Maple Leafs...Laughs as i called them over the years...this was the year of the great turn-around for the Leafs as they went all the way to the semi-finals only to lose to Gretzky and the Kings...with all due respect to the G-Man..his hattrick that game ruined what was to be the dream match for Canadians...with the Habs waiting to play the winners...could you have imagined back in 1992 what a story it would have been...Habs and Leafs in the finals for the first time since 1967?!?!!? Burns facing his old team? Two hot french goalies in Pat Roy and Felix Potvin? It would have been a ratings blockbuster for CBC and i bet that those would have been ratings so high that i don't know what would have broken them...
Eventually Mr Burns would coach the Bruins and then i believe the Devils where he finally got this Cup... cancer is a terrible thing folks...i watched my own Dad deteriorate over the course of two years before he finally passed away in 2006...My Dad went from being 230 pounds to just barely over 100... it was hard to watch and i felt so helpless...i can only imagine what the Burns family went through during this ordeal...Pat Burns was a man who taught the meaning of the word endurance to many while he continued his fight against this godawful disease.
He should be in the Hall of Fame..im not going to take anything away from this years group...but cmon..Stanley Cup...three Jack Adams trophies..protocol for getting in the Hall be damned, i just wish the NHL had half the class that Mr Burns had, did the right thing and put him in the Hall of Fame while he was still around to enjoy it...i can only imagine what Don Cherry is going to say on Coaches Corner tonight..i expect nothing less that a full tribute..the world is a lesser place today because not only is a great coach gone...but an incredible human being that never knew the meaning of the word quit...
RIP Mr Burns..
RIP
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