That's Scotty!

To understand Scotty, you have to know one thing: What human nature dictates, he does the opposite."
—R�jean Houle, Montreal Canadiens general manager and a former player under Bowman

On the night he tied Toe Blake's coaching record by winning his eighth Stanley Cup, on the night the NHL record book was getting more attention than any tome Oprah ever recommended, the man who defies human nature looked better prepared for an audit than for immortality. While the Detroit Red Wings poured champagne, their coach, Scotty Bowman, was poring over ice times. The NHL allows no one, not even Bowman, to win more than one Stanley Cup a year, but there he was on June 16, his Red Wings having just closed out the Washington Capitals 4-1 in Game 4 for their second straight Stanley Cup sweep, with no game to coach until October, or maybe ever, worrying about the minutes on the stat sheet instead of the vintage of the bubbly. This probably should have been more emotional than any of his other Cup victories, considering that wheelchair-bound Detroit defenseman Vladimir Konstantinov had risen and acknowledged the cheers of the Washington crowd early in the third period, but Bowman had hoisted the Cup as dispassionately as a man signaling for a refill of coffee.

That's Scotty. Which is what everyone who knows him says. There are probably 2,123 anecdotes about Bowman, one for every game he has coached, and that phrase will conclude many of them. "You had a group of players who might not all get along, who might not be friends," says Steve Shutt, a Hall of Fame left wing and a favorite Bowman whipping boy on five Bowman-coached, Cup-winning Canadiens teams of the 1970s, "but the one thing we had in common was a Scotty story." And so it is that Edmonton Oilers assistant general manager Doug Risebrough, who played for Bowman for five seasons with the Montreal, utters the phrase after he recounts how Bowman shifted him from center to left wing for the last 20 games of one season, berated him for his play on the wing and then, without a word, started him at center in the playoffs because "he wanted to know if my pissed-off [attitude] would turn into quit or into fight-back." Similarly, Red Wings associate coach Dave Lewis says it after describing how Bowman, who has coached the Red Wings for five seasons, will do something unfathomable like look at one end of the ice while a three-on-one is developing at the other end. That's Scotty.

For those who know Bowman, or think they do, That's Scotty is an all-purpose explanation for the otherwise inexplicable, and a phrase as final as Amen. Playing for Bowman is an act of faith. "After warmups for Game 6 against Dallas [in this year's semifinals], he decided to change his lines," Detroit left wing Brendan Shanahan says. "With any other coach, you'd think, What the hell is he doing? This could cost us the series. But I don't think anybody in the room popped his head up. He pulled me and Stevie [Yzerman, the Red Wings captain] into his office and asked us if it would be O.K. if he played me on the right and Stevie on the left with Sergei [Fedorov]. I said, 'Sure.' I hadn't played right wing in about nine years, but I was thinking that if Scotty thinks it's a good idea, I think it's a good idea." Detroit won that game 2-0 to close out Dallas.

This is also Scotty: the best coach or manager of a team in any of North America's major pro sports. Ever. In proclaiming Bowman the best, we compared not only apples to apples, like Bowman to Blake, but also apples to plums like Bowman to Red Auerbach and Joe McCarthy, and apples to peaches like Bowman to George Halas and Paul Brown (boxes, right and page 71). But before we pepper you with the numbers, you must accept two premises: 1) winning championships with multiple teams as Bowman has is more difficult than winning them with a single franchise as most other storied coaches and managers have done, and 2) coaching a team has never been more complex or perilous than it is today. The financial stakes are higher. The pressure is greater. The seasons are longer. In 30-team leagues in a 500-channel universe, the job of guiding $6 million-a-year players for itchy owners who have one eye on the standings and the other on a stadium referendum is more taxing than the task faced by (to mention two baseball skippers of yore) either the gruff John McGraw or the lovable Casey Stengel. Winning championships in the modern era is the ultimate tiebreaker.

Tom Landry never could adapt. Vince Lombardi never had to, and neither did Blake. Among the legends—and SI examined the most accomplished coaches in each sport—only Phil Jackson, Pat Riley and Glen Sather have won as many as four championships in the past 15 years. What's more, no one has duplicated Bowman's successes in so many cities and with so many generations of athletes.

The bedouin Bowman has won Cups with three clubs (the Pittsburgh Penguins as well as Montreal and Detroit); reached the finals three times with another, the St Louis Blues; and holds the record for most playoff wins in every one of his stops (the above four plus the Buffalo Sabres). He has won with Flying Frenchmen and the Russian Revolution. He has won with offense in Pittsburgh. He has won with defense in Montreal and Detroit. He has won championships over a 25-year span, and only Papa Bear Halas, whose first NFL title came in 1921 and last in '63, won them over a longer period of time. "He started coaching guys who had summer jobs and crew cuts, and now he's coaching guys with Ferraris, earrings, blond streaks and agents," Shanahan says. "I read something like that about Don Shula once. I immediately thought of Scotty" The difference: Bowman has won eight titles in 26 years; Shula won two in 33.

Choose your measuring stick. Regular season: In 26 seasons Bowman has had one losing record, 3-7-2 in Buffalo in 1986-87. (He was also the Sabres' general manager and handed over the coaching to Craig Ramsay.) Among coaches with more than 10 years of service, only McCarthy (24-0), Riley (16-0), Steve O'Neill (14-0), Marty Schottenheimer (14-0), Blake (13-0), and George Allen (12-0) never finished below .500 during a season. Bowman's .658 regular-season winning percentage, however, is superior to McCarthy's .614. Bowman is also the only NHL coach to win 60 games in a regular season, and he did it twice, with Montreal in 1976-77 and Detroit in 1995-96.

Playoffs (10 or more postseason appearances): Bowman's .636 winning percentage trails only those of Sather (.706), Blake (.689) and Chuck Noll (.667).

Championships: Auerbach surpasses Bowman with nine and Blake ties him with eight, but all except the last of Blake's Cups required winning only two series (compared to three or four in the case of each of Bowman's Cups). Similarly, Auerbach's Boston Celtics didn't have to keep peeling back layer after playoff layer to prevail. Indeed, for all his championships, Auerbach won 99 postseason games in 20 years, barely half of the 194 that Bowman has won in his 26 years. Bowman's eight championships equal the combined totals of Walter Alston, John McGraw and Billy Martin in baseball; of Lombardi and Bill Walsh in football; of Riley, Red Holzman and Chuck Daly in basketball; and of Al Arbour, Jack Adams and Mike Keenan in hockey. Or if you prefer the parlor version of the game, Bowman one-ups the Browns (Paul and Larry) 8-7; grinds up the Chucks ( Daly, Noll and Knox) 8-6; and downs the Beers ( Bud Grant and Miller Huggins) 8-3.