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The moment Jack Hughes stepped off the ice in the New Jersey Devils’ season opener — after he dangled through three Chicago Blackhawks, and scored on his backhand for an absurd overtime winner, then tossed his stick into the crowd in a moment of euphoric celebration — he turned to a team staffer and had one question:
“Am I going to get in trouble?”
Hughes, 20, spends his Sunday afternoons on his couch glued to NFL Red Zone. He knows all too well how the NFL’s taunting rule stirs controversy. Hockey, by nature, is much more reserved than football, with players rarely flexing their personality off the ice, let alone on it. Hughes had never seen an NHL player throw his stick into the stands before. He doesn’t know what compelled him to do it. He was intoxicated by playing in front of “a full barn again” with “an unreal crowd” that was “buzzing all night.”
He knows one thing for sure: “The boys loved it.” As for the suits in the NHL office across the Hudson River?
“Like, you just don’t know with the league and what they think,” Hughes said. “I didn’t know. I just thought, ‘If I get fined a few grand, I’m not taking this fine. The team better pick this up.'”
His concerns turned out to be moot. The league wrote a story on its website about the center’s twig-throwing heroics, and shared the clip on its social channels (several times). A month later, Hughes’ phone was blowing up with messages from his longtime buddy, Anaheim Ducks forward Trevor Zegras.
“I had like 10 texts from him and he’s like, ‘dude, hilarious!’ laughing faces, all of this,” Hughes recalled. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ and he’s like, ‘Go look at my goal.'”
After roofing an overtime winner against the Washington Capitals, the 20-year-old Zegras launched his stick into the Anaheim crowd.
“I was like, ‘That’s nasty,'” Hughes said. “We were talking about it before, the last few weeks. So I wouldn’t be surprised if another one of my buddies were to do it, too.”
Hughes’ story is often told through…
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Source : espn
