Burke's Law by Brian Burke & Stephen Brunt

Author:Brian Burke & Stephen Brunt [Burke, Brian & Brunt, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

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The experiment with Keenan and me was doomed to failure because he was never going to work as part of a tandem. He had to be the only horse in the race. He had to be the boss.

Mike’s got a very charming side to him. He can fool you. The code in hockey is that you’re nice to everyone’s family. When my kids would come in to visit, he couldn’t have been kinder to them. But he’s a chameleon who thrives on conflict. You know those insurance commercials with the mayhem guy? That’s Mike. If things are going well, he’ll start a fight.

The way he manages a team is by picking out a couple of guys and bullying them. That’s what he did to Trevor Linden in Vancouver before they finally traded him. I told Mike that that wasn’t how my team was going to operate. I wanted a family atmosphere. But he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—change. He stayed true to his nature. Mike eventually self-destructs by tearing the dressing room apart.

And it’s not like he’s a tactical genius. Technically, his practices were like hockey school drills—rudimentary stuff. They were fucking hard—his teams are in shape, and his players finish all their checks, even the skill guys. They work hard and they’re hard to play against. But all he had were those seven simple drills, and he never practised the power play. You look at how complex practices are these days. We were back in the ’50s with Mike.

One time, I went to him and told him I wanted him to practise the power play.

“We don’t practise the power play,” Mike said.

“I know,” I said, “and it sucks. So, tomorrow we are practising the power play.”

The next day, he called the players together and said, “Management says we have to practise the power play, so we’re practising the power play.”

And they did. For two minutes. Then he went back to his usual drills.

I was sitting there in the rink, watching as my own head coach symbolically gave me the finger.

My only regret when I finally fired Keenan was that I had told him I would give him a chance to work with any players we got back in a trade for Pavel Bure, and it didn’t work out that way.

When it came to dealing Bure, I didn’t have any choice. He came in to see me with his agent, Mike Gillis, before training camp, and they both told me unequivocally that he wasn’t going to play for us again, that he would hold out until we traded him.

I guess I was breaking my own rule, to a degree, because at first I tried to talk him out of it, reminding him of our history together.

“I got you out of your contract with Red Army,” I told him. “I drove you across the border. You owe me more than this.”

“Burkie, it’s not about you,” he said. “I do owe you. But the way this organization has treated me, there are things that can’t be fixed.

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