There’s no tomorrow for Team Europe at World Cup of Hockey

When an NHL team’s season ends, whether after 82 regular-season games or a playoff series, players usually have the next season to look forward to, and they often speak about reuniting to chase a championship. But there is no next season for Team Europe at the World Cup of Hockey tournament, and it won’t have a next game if it loses to Team Canada on Thursday in Game 2 of the best-of-three final series.

“I guess in that regard it’s a little bit of a weird feeling,” Kings and Europe center Anze Kopitar said Thursday morning, “but we’ve said it all along — we’re living in the moment. Right now, we’re not looking too far ahead.”

Canada won the opener, 3-1, on Tuesday. Should Europe (3-2-0) beat favored Canada (5-0-0) on Thursday at Air Canada Centre, the World Cup winner would be decided on Saturday at the same venue.

Team Europe was created for this eight-team tournament to accommodate players whose homelands likely would not have qualified under the procedures that are used to determine entrants for the world championships and Olympics. Its players have represented eight countries in international play.

The next World Cup is tentatively scheduled to be staged in 2020, but the format and rules have not been determined. There might not be another Team Europe, so players on the current team have decided to make the most of every moment they have here. They had a team dinner on Wednesday and were quietly confident Thursday while contemplating the unique nature of their no-tomorrow situation.

“We’re speaking about getting better as a team again. It’s not just lip service with us,” Coach Ralph Krueger said after Europe’s morning skate. “It’s truly been our mantra, to keep the picture small and be able to focus on whatever the next challenge was. We’ve had many where people would have doubted us and we needed to stay tight in our world to find the belief to be successful through all the different hurdles we’ve jumped over already.

“We know how big the one is tonight. We’ve felt a calm in the room, but there is a really nice fight and a nice edge and intensity in the group through these two days. We’re just trying to guide them properly as far as the corrections we need to make. There are some technical and tactical things that need to happen.”

Kopitar has more on his mind besides Thursday’s game. His wife, Ines, is due to give birth to the couple’s second child any day now in Los Angeles, and he’s hoping she can hold on until he can be with her. In the meantime, he’d like his team to finish well here, and he said it can build off the many good things it did and eliminate the mistakes it made in losing Game 1 on Tuesday.

“We feel good. As I said after the game, I think we played arguably the best game so far in this tournament, but we just fell short,” he said. “Because of that, we can’t get discouraged. Our backs are against the wall now. We’ve got to win two games to win the thing. We’ve got to come out and play with confidence. There’s no reason for us to be nervous about anything. Come out, play hard, and we’ll see what happens.”

helene.elliott@latimes.com

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