Peter DeBoer to replace Todd McLellan as Sharks head coach: report

Peter DeBoer helped head coach Todd McLellan in guiding Canada to a gold medal at the recent world hockey championship, and now is set to take the latter's old job in San Jose.

The 46-year-old DeBoer reportedly will be named head coach of the Sharks on Thursday at a 4 p.m. ET news conference.

McLellan and the Sharks mutually agreed he would leave the team with one year left on his contract after San Jose missed the playoffs for the first time in his seven years behind the bench.

DeBoer was fired 36 games into his fourth season as head coach of the New Jersey Devils on Dec. 26, 2014 in the midst of a 16-game slide. He departed with an overall record of 114-93-41 and led the Devils to the Stanley Cup final in his first season in 2012.

DeBoer also coached the Florida Panthers for three seasons from 2008-09 through the 2010-11 campaign.

Before joining the Panthers, DeBoer spent 14 seasons in the Ontario Hockey League, winning two league championships with Kitchener (2003, 2008) and the 2003 Memorial Cup. He was also an assistant with Canada's national junior team in 1998 and 2005.

DeBoer was also an assistant with the Canadian team at last year's world tourney in Minsk, Belarus, where it fell 3-2 to Finland in the quarter-finals after going 5-1-1 in the preliminary round.

DeBoer has ties to the Sharks front office. Larry Robinson was one of his assistants in New Jersey and is director of player development in San Jose after serving as an assistant to McLellan the past three seasons.

The Sharks are in the middle of a rebuilding plan that started in earnest after a playoff collapse last spring in an opening-round series against Los Angeles. San Jose became the fourth NHL team ever to lose a best-of-seven series after winning the first three games.

Sharks general manager Doug Wilson committed to a youth movement after that loss and Joe Thornton was stripped of his captaincy as part of the transition to younger players.

The plan did not go as smoothly as hoped as the Sharks missed the playoffs for the first time since the 2002-03 season, ending the second-longest active run in the NHL. San Jose finished 12th in the 14-team Western Conference with 89 points.

DeBoer will take over a team that still has many of the same core pieces who were part of those playoff runs in Thornton and Patrick Marleau. But San Jose is also trying to build around players in their primes like Joe Pavelski, Brent Burns, Logan Couture and Marc-Edouard Vlasic, as well as younger players like Tomas Hertl, Mirco Mueller, Tommy Wingels, Matt Nieto and Chris Tierney.