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Normally I stick to Montreal Canadiens’ books however, what drew me to Burke’s Law was the fact that he spent most of his career as an executive in hockey in the years I grew up watching it in the 1990s. While I wasn’t a Canucks’ fan, it’s still interesting to read how he managed to pull off one of the biggest draft trades ever, allowing the Canucks to pick 2nd and 3rd overall in 1999 to snatch the Sedin twins. This book will also allow you to learn how the Canucks ended up drafting Pavel Bure when most teams though the Russian Rocket was ineligible and the 4 laws by with Burke lead his life, on and off the ice. It’s also interesting to hear with GM were a pain to deal with when he was in charge of supplementary discipline for the league (Pierre Lacroix from the Avs was one of the worst apparently while Lou Lamoriello who he had known for years was a pleasure to deal with).
The same Lamoriello was the one who gave him a push to go to law school and because of whom he eventually became a hockey executive. As an executive, he also gives his insight on how to build a good hockey team with plenty of talent, speed, skill but also some grits. Unlike a lot of people these days, Burke believes that fighting still has its place in hockey, to keep the players accountable. What I didn’t know though is that Burke, prior to working for team and for the NHL, also represented players. He says he was never an agent per se, but that he did represent some players under certain conditions. One such player was Brett Hull and Burke had no issue telling him what he needed to do to put his career on track and it worked like a charm.
I particularly enjoyed the chapter when he talks about his beginnings as an assistant GM with the Canucks and how he thinks it’s possible to make a community fall in love with its hockey team, even though they aren’t successful on the ice. Considering the situation, the Montreal Canadiens are in right now, the third pillar of his secret to making the community love the team particularly resonated with me, he describes it as this: “The third pillar is that my teams are going to play an entertaining style of hockey. We’ll never trap. We’ll try to score goals. We’ll trade scoring chances. When I see a coach being interviewed on television after a game and he says, “I’m really proud of our guys because we only allowed two scoring chances after the first period.”; I’m thinking, ‘Yeah and I bet that sold a lot of tickets”. In a nutshell, Burke likes riskier entertaining hockey and I dare say that Kent Hughes seems to be the same in that respect thankfully.
Overall, this is a really entertaining book for any hockey nut really, whichever team you like, and I thoroughly recommend reading it. If you do grab it and read it, please let me know what you thought of it.
Montreal Canadiens Blogger • 
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