DETROIT — Scotty Bowman stands atop the Detroit Red Wings bench like II Duce on the balcony.
The little man's jaw is raised, his lips pursed, his head cocked at a belligerent angle. It is the hands-on-hips pose of authority, of motionless swagger, of a barely disguised disdain for all those below.
His Wings are minutes away from eliminating Colorado. Earlier in the series, Bowman, 63, so infuriated his boyish counterpart, Marc Crawford, that the Avalanche coach tried to assault him.
Crawford was not the first infuriated by this smug native of Montreal. Bowman is a dictator, often a despised dictator. And he has earned the reputation.
Bowman has coached and won more games than anyone in NHL history. He went to the Stanley Cup finals in his first three seasons. And when his Red Wings begin their series with the Flyers Saturday night, it will be his 11th championship series in 25 seasons. He has won six, second only to the eight captured by his mentor, Toe Blake, the man who told Bowman to “do your own thing.”
And should the Red Wings triumph in these finals, he would become the first coach in NHL history to win Cups with three teams.
Yet his success has not been translated into popularity. Not that he would want it to be.
“Some people don't like Scotty,” Detroit winger Brendan Shanahan said. “So what? I just know he is an asset to have behind the bench going into a series like this.
“The man has been to so many Stanley Cup finals that you're not going to surprise him. And … you trust him when he tells you to do something. Trust, I think, is the key to his relationship with players.”
Bowman expects much from his players, and though he generally communicates with them only through assistants, they know they are constantly being evaluated.
When he was hired in Detroit, most observers expected Bowman to stay only for the two years of his contract. But he's been here four and won at a remarkable rate.
The Red Wings have gone 252-167-72 under Bowman and won two President's Trophies for most regular-season points.
Last season, they won an NHL-record 62 games.
He has been doing it that way for 30 years, ever since this man who never played professional hockey took over the St. Louis Blues from Lynn Patrick in 1967-68, the first season of expansion.
The Blues were bigger and bad-der than their expansion rivals and, ironically, were the reason the Flyers developed a fondness for physical players. Because the playoff format then mandated that an expansion team meet one of the Original Six in the finals, Bowman took the Blues to three straight.
After four seasons there, he went to Montreal, where in eight years he won five Cups with one of the greatest teams in NHL history.
“Of course, he has won a lot of Cups,” said Colorado goalie Patrick Roy, no Bowman fan, during the conference-championship series, “but look at the great teams he has had.”
He didn't have nearly as much success in seven seasons in Buffalo. When he was fired there in '87, Bowman became a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada. In 1991, he was hired in Pittsburgh and the Penguins won their first Cup — Bowman's sixth — under him in 1992.
Bowman also has coached more playoff games — 269 — than anyone in history, and critics often accuse him of playing head games in postseason. He likes to complain, they say, about some extraneous thing — ice surface, a player's equipment — knowing he is going to irritate the opponent.
If so, he refused to be drawn into that game when Flyers coach Terry Murray fired a pre-emptive strike, calling Detroit defenceman Vladimir Konstantinov one of the NHL's dirtiest players.
Asked how he responded, Bowman said:
“I don't. We got into all that stuff in the last series. Both teams have tendencies, and I'm sure they'll address things to the people that run the series. And we'll get our opportunity to do the same.”
Then he couldn't resist a subtle jab at his novice counterpart.
“That's the way it should be done,” he said, “and that's the way we'll do it.”
Like it or not.