‘Always an honour to represent the country’
Former National Hockey League head coach Michel Therrien, who has been behind the bench for the Montreal Canadiens and Pittsburgh Penguins, was announced as the head coach of Team Canada at the upcoming Spengler Cup.
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The 62-year-old Therrien joined First Up on TSN1050 on Friday to discuss how he came be the head coach of the team and his expectations for this year’s tournament.
“It’s always an honour, every time you get a chance to represent the country, especially as a head coach,” Therrien said. “To be part of the Spengler Cup, to be honest, it was part of my bucket list, and lots of the time [those things don’t] happen.”
Therrien worked two stints with the Canadiens as head coach, from 2000-03 and from 2012-17, and coached from 2005-09 with the Penguins. He led the Penguins to the Stanley Cup Final in the 2007-08 campaign, where they fell in six games to the Detroit Red Wings.
It was during his second stop in Montreal that Therrien worked alongside Marc Bergevin, the current general manager of Team Canada for the Spengler Cup. That connection lay the ground work for Therrien to take this position at the Spengler Cup.
“When Marc Bergevin gave me a call, telling me he’s got the job as a general manager [with Canada at the Spengler Cup], I was honoured to receive that call asking me if I wanted to coach his team over there,” Therrien said.
“He recommended I talk to my good friend Gerard Gallant, who coached Team Canada last year, and [Gallant] only had good things to say about the way, first of all, Hockey Canada treats their people, about the tournament, about the atmosphere, and that it was a great experience.”
Gallant’s Team Canada suffered a surprising defeat at the hands of the German upstart Straubing Tigers in the 2024 semifinals. The Tigers played in their first final at the Spengler Cup in the history of the tournament as a result of that 4-2 victory.
Last year was the third consecutive tournament where Team Canada failed to advance to the final. Factoring in the two tournaments cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Canada has not played in a Spengler Cup final in five years. Their last victory at the tournament came in 2019.
Therrien is focused on putting the best team possible on the ice, and is looking forward to working toward that with Bergevin.
“People from Hockey Canada work extremely hard to try to put a team together,” Therrien said. “It’s challenging, to be quite honest, to put a team together, because you cannot have the guys in the NHL, there’s a lot of restrictions regarding some players, not everyone wants to go, but at the end of the day the guys are coming in on a volunteer basis and it’s going to be a great experience.
“There’s a difference between a great experience and a fantastic experience- a fantastic experience is to win and bring back the Spengler Cup.”
