Paul Maurice will be a Team Europe assistant coach for World Cup of Hockey

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This article was published 12/11/2015 (3676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DALLAS — Winnipeg Jets head coach Paul Maurice has coached for Canada internationally. Now, he’s being asked to coach against Canada.

The Jets announced Thursday Maurice will be an assistant coach for Team Europe at next year’s World Cup of Hockey. Maurice will work under Winnipeg-born Ralph Krueger, who was previously named Team Europe’s head coach.

Maurice has previous international coaching experience as an assistant coach for Team Canada at the 2014 IIHF World Championship and has also coached in Russia’s KHL.

But coaching against his own country? That’s a new one even for Maurice and he said he’s relishing the challenge.

“It’s going to be fantastic,” said Maurice. “You will see all the best Canadians on one team and they will be well prepared and very confident and they’re in a home building. But I’ve spent a big bulk of my coaching career with underdog teams, so we will certainly fit that bill when that game comes.”

Team Europe is in Group A at the World Cup with Canada, the U.S. and Czech Republic. Team Europe will be made up of players from Germany, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Slovenia, Latvia and possibly even France and Belarus.

Among the players who could potentially make that Europe team is the Jets’ own Danish-born Nikolaj Ehlers, who said he’d love nothing better than to play for his current coach internationally.

“It’s awesome for him,” said Ehlers. “It’s pretty cool to be part of those tournaments… It’s going to be a lot of fun and it’s going to be different.”

The tournament will run from Sept. 16 to Oct. 1, 2016 in Toronto and Maurice would normally be busy at that time of the year preparing his own team for the upcoming NHL season.

But the league is delaying the start of training camp for the tournament next year and Maurice said he’s been informed he will miss very little, if any, of Jets’ training camp next year due to this new role.

“The only time you would miss, it’s my understanding, is if you were in the final,” Maurice said following the Jets’ morning skate at American Airlines Center. “And the guys who don’t get to that final group shouldn’t miss any of training camp. The only thing I’m going to miss is the (Jets) prospects camp. And that might be a good thing.

“I don’t know the opinions I’ve necessarily had on players coming out of prospect camp have helped me as much as I’d hoped it would because I saw completely different players when they got to main camp.

“And more important than that, we’ve got training camp (preparations) done before September rolls around — our approach, the video is all done, the concepts are all there… So I have no concerns about that. I think the payoff for me stealing ideas is going to be good.”

Maurice said his relationship with Krueger goes back to when he was a head coach in Carolina and Krueger did scouting for the Hurricanes. Maurice said Krueger approached him in the past week and asked him to join the Team Europe staff and he jumped at the chance.

“You will learn an awful lot just being around different coaches. And being around different players, you get little pieces of everyone else’s systems they run and… see some of the personalities. And you can give your general manager a feel for 25 guys you didn’t know before.”

The Jets made the announcement of Maurice’s hiring after news leaked out via TSN that Maurice had been hired.

The news seemed to brighten the mood of Maurice, who had been surly for days as his team limped through a slump that had seen the Jets lose three games in a row — and four of their last five — heading into Thursday night’s game against the Dallas Stars.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek