Is Leafs coach Craig Berube the new Pat Burns in Toronto?

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Craig Berube doesn’t look a whole lot like Pat Burns, doesn’t sound a whole lot like Pat Burns, but when you break down what he believes in as a coach, his sensibilities sure feel a lot like the departed Burns.

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Burns was, for those who remember, the most bombastic and successful Maple Leafs coach of the post-expansion era.

He wasn’t smooth the way Pat Quinn was smooth and quick with his words. He wasn’t completely accomplished before he got here, the way Mike Babcock was accomplished when he got here, and he wasn’t full of himself or full of anything else, the way Babcock was in his time with the Leafs.

Berube is a coach of few words publicly. He provides as many as he has to under the circumstances. He’s still figuring out Toronto and Toronto still is figuring him out.

But the more he speaks, the more he moves players around, the more he rolls his eyes — one of his favourite things to do in his daily news gatherings — the more reminiscent he seems of Burns, a coach he once hoped to play for.

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Burns was a semi-nobody coaching Sherbrooke of the American League, the Montreal Canadiens farm team, when Berube was a semi-nobody trying to make an impression with the Hershey Bears of the very same league.

The same year Burns landed in Montreal, Berube wound up patrolling the wing for the Philadelphia Flyers. One ex-cop keeping an eye out, one playing a cop for the Flyers.

“Pat was one of my favourites,” Berube said. “I always wanted to play for him and never got the opportunity. I said that to him.

“I told him I’d like to play for you at some point in time. Never had the chance, unfortunately.”

Now their names are linked on the all-time list of Maple Leafs coaches. They may be different coaches and this certainty is a different time, but if you make a list of what mattered most to Burns, what he demanded on a daily basis from his players, how his vision of team included every single player, how he wanted to control play on the boards and away from them, it sounds like what matters now to Berube.

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“He was a man’s man,” Berube said of Burns. “My type of coach. He was a straight shooter. Tells you like it is. And personable at the same time, approachable at the same time. He’s the type of guy you want to sit down and have a conversation with.”

And maybe a beer. Almost certainly a beer.

Doug Gilmour, now a Leafs season-ticket holder, played for 14 different coaches — more if you count the interim fill-ins — in his Hall of Fame career. The best he ever played was for Burns in those memorable Toronto seasons. The best coach he played for, in his words, Jacques Lemaire. The best motivator, Jacques Demers.

The Maple Leafs of 1992-93 were much different than Berube’s current team. They weren’t expected to be a playoff team, let alone a contender. They weren’t expected to come within a win of the Stanley Cup final.

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But they were similar in one area: On defence.

Those Leafs teams had a workmanlike defence of Dave Ellett, Sylvain Lefebvre, Dmitri Mironov, Todd Gill, Bob Rouse and Jamie Macoun.

Berube has a defence of Morgan Rielly, Chris Tanev, Jake McCabe, Simon Benoit, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and either Timothy Liljegren or Conor Timmins.

One defence is not a whole lot better than the other.

But Burns had this first-year magic about him everywhere he went. He took Montreal to a Cup final in his first NHL season. He took the Leafs to the semifinal against Los Angeles in 1993. His Boston team went from 61 points to 91 in Burns’ first campaign and, in Jersey, he won his only Stanley Cup with the Devils.

Berube won his only Cup in St. Louis coming in as interim coach in 2018-19.

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The Leafs are his third coaching assignment, his second time starting anew with a club. Toronto is coming off a 105-point season. There isn’t a lot of place to grow in terms of number of points: The growth will measured in other ways, from special teams play to compete level to defensive mindset, so many of the aspects both Burns and Berube consider mandatory.

“On our team,” Gilmour said. “We had a rule. You can’t turn the puck over at your blueline in the first two minutes of the game or in the last two minutes of the period. That was a no-no. I did that once in the first minutes. I don’t think I got on again until the third period that night.

“That’s what it was like with Burnsy. The rules were clear. You had to abide by them.”

When Burns was coaching the Leafs to the semifinals in 1994 and lost to Quinn in Vancouver, Berube was playing for the Washington Capitals. One of his closest friends, then and now, was Dale Hunter.

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They would watch hockey together back then and talk of becoming coaches one day. They talked about what they do and how they would do it.

Hunter has since gone on to become the premier coach in junior hockey and Berube is now coaching in the market where hockey matters most.

When Burns first looked at his new Maple Leafs roster, at the beginning of training camp at what is now called Herb Carnegie Arena in North York, he said: “This team isn’t as bad as I was led to believe it was.”

Berube starts with a Leafs team loaded up front with Auston Matthews, William Nylander and Mitch Marner. This team has been at its worst when it matters most.

The judgment for Berube’s first season will come in April and May, the very same months Burns became legendary as a Maple Leaf to be remembered forever.

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