"It’s a position like pitching in baseball," he said, "where without it you have no chance. It doesn’t matter how good the rest of your team is, it doesn’t matter how good of a job you’ve done as a GM, if you don’t have goaltending you can’t win.

"I learned that lesson the hard way in Vancouver."

"To this day, I don’t fault Dan Cloutier," Burke said. "It’s just he got hurt every year at an inopportune time. But when I left there I said, ‘Never again. Never again will I try to go into battle without real artillery.’"