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NHL National
Friday, November 3
Woe has become a way of life in Buffalo, Boston



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.

Byron Dafoe
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.

  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.  ”
—  Sabres coach Lindy Ruff
"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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