New Jersey Devils' Jack Hughes hits $100,000 shot on the Pat McAfee Show

Jack Hughes has been on a long media tour after scoring the Golden Goal for Team USA on Sunday. He secured the gold medal against Canada by beating Jordan Binnington five hole during 3v3 overtime. That moment secured his place as an American hero forever. He’s always going to be named as one of the best Winter Olympic athletes of all time. 

Since scoring that goal, he’s spoken to dozens of media outlets. He’s spoken on national media outlets on both morning and evening shows. He’s talked to local outlets in Miami after coming back from Milan. Hughes spoke with sports outlets looked to get an idea of what that moment felt like. And now, he’s apparently heading to the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live. 

On Friday, he spent his day off by heading to Indianapolis, home of Pat McAfee. The Pat McAfee Show is the biggest daily show on ESPN, drawing about 500,000 daily viewers on all platforms. However, he’s big into viral moments, and the big moments can get millions of views.

We think that Hughes might be taking part in one of those viral moments. On the show, he talked about when he expects to jump in the dentist’s chair to fix his teeth, how this moment was something he dreamed about his whole life, and the narrative around the situation with the women’s team. He went into the relationship he has with Megan Keller, who scored the Golden Goal for the women’s team. Keller was also on the Pat McAfee Show later on Friday virtually. 

But the big moment here was when McAfee put Hughes on the spot. He made him stand on his set and hit a ball hockey shot across the field into a drum of some kind. The prize? $100,000 to a charity of Hughes’s choice.

There was a lot of pressure on the shot, and Hughes admitted so, saying that he was nervous before hitting the shot. McAfee reminded Hughes that he hit the Golden Goal in front of 26 million viewers just a few days prior, so this should be cake.

And it was cake. Hughes drilled the shot, winning $100,000 from the show. We haven’t heard about which charity the money is going to, but we imagine Hughes’s personal charity, Pucks & Pages, might be getting the dividends of that moment on live television.