{"id":468016,"date":"2026-02-23T11:46:24","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T11:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/468016\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T11:46:24","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T11:46:24","slug":"meet-us-hockey-player-jack-hughes-who-scored-the-golden-goal-at-the-winter-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/468016\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet US hockey player Jack Hughes, who scored the golden goal at the Winter Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

US hockey player Jack Hughes quite literally fought tooth and nail at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan<\/a>. The 24-year-old centre for the NHL\u2019s New Jersey Devils scored the winning goal against Team Canada in the gold medal game on Sunday after taking a stick to the face and losing two of his teeth. This is the third time the US has won the Olympics men\u2019s ice hockey gold, and the first since 1980.<\/p>\n

Hughes\u2019 missing front teeth barely seem to have dampened his mood. \u201cI looked on the ice and saw my teeth like, \u2018Here we go again\u2019,\u201d the forward joked to the media at the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena. \u201cI\u2019m from the best country in the world. We\u2019ve got great dentists there, too. So I\u2019m lucky I\u2019m American, and they\u2019re gonna fix me right up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JackJack Hughes in the Ralph Lauren Team USA uniform. Photo: @jackhughes\/Instagram<\/p>\n

The athlete went on to celebrate his team\u2019s victory on Instagram with a post featuring a photo of him and his stylish new tooth gap alongside his team. \u201cI love my country,\u201d he wrote in the caption, adding US flag emojis.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s everything you need to know about Jack Hughes.<\/p>\n

He grew up in an athletic family\"JackJack Hughes with his family. Photo: @jackhughes\/Instagram<\/p>\n

Jack Hughes was born in May 2001 in Orlando, Florida. His father, Jim, played hockey and later became a coach. His mother, Ellen, grew up playing football and lacrosse, and later collegiate ice hockey at the University of New Hampshire, winning a silver medal on the USA squad at the 1992 Women\u2019s World Championship.<\/p>\n

Jack learned to skate while he was around two years old and started playing organised hockey at the age of five.<\/p>\n

\"JackJack Hughes playing ice hockey as a kid. Photo: @jackhughes\/Instagram<\/p>\n

In 2006, the family relocated to Toronto, Canada, where Jim worked as an assistant for the Maple Leafs\u2019 AHL team. It was there that Jack and his older brother Quinn really started getting into hockey. They would spend hours playing hockey in the basement of their family home, per NHL\u2019s website. Their younger brother, Luke, also plays the sport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US hockey player Jack Hughes quite literally fought tooth and nail at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5109],"tags":[2363,4087,16165,201,1014,5,56659,1003,576,151,5185,5184,40,4,177,56658,208,1015,1321,1369],"class_list":["post-468016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-jersey-devils","tag-asia","tag-business","tag-china","tag-devils","tag-economy","tag-hockey","tag-hong-kong","tag-lifestyle","tag-new-jersey","tag-new-jersey-devils","tag-newjersey","tag-newjerseydevils","tag-news","tag-nhl","tag-opinion","tag-south-china-morning-post","tag-sport","tag-technology","tag-us","tag-world"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116119784359905295","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}