Back-to-back Stanley Cup champion coach Paul Maurice apparently wasn’t really in the running to compete for a gold medal at the Olympics.<\/p>\n
After it was reported<\/a> earlier in the Games that a player representative requested the Finnish national team’s general manager to hire Maurice for the head-coaching job, the Florida Panthers<\/a> bench boss dismissed the idea Saturday<\/p>\n “Yeah, I got a bunch of texts. Silliness,” Maurice told reporters. “I think somebody got confused with Tuomo Ruutu. There was a Panther coach on the bench, it just wasn’t me.”<\/p>\n Ruutu, a Finnish former player, is included on Maurice\u2019s Panthers staff, and is one of Finland’s assistant coaches at the Olympics.<\/p>\n Maurice also coaches Finnish national players Eetu Luostarinen, Anton Lundell and Niko Mikkola. Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov also would have been on the Finnish team if he wasn’t injured. <\/p>\n Despite the possibility to compete for an Olympic medal, Maurice said he wouldn’t be interested in coaching Team Finland.<\/p>\n “They have too many good coaches over in Finland, they don’t need me,” Maurice said. “(He’s) born in Canada, I’m a U.S. citizen. I think I’ll stay in Fort Lauderdale for these tournaments. Worked out just fine.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back-to-back Stanley Cup champion coach Paul Maurice apparently wasn’t really in the running to compete for a gold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-483585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}