A shirtless 25-year-old storms around the visitors’ dressing room in Buffalo, screaming out the starting lineup like his life depends on it. That’s Alex Newhook before Game 2 against the Buffalo Sabres. Fired up, loud, and, based on reports, in possession of Phillip Danault’s coffee, which he had apparently helped himself to before puck drop. Whether that’s theft or superstition is a matter of perspective. What isn’t up for debate is what happened after his caffeine fix.
Newhook scored 96 seconds into the game. Then scored again in the second period to help tie the series at one apiece.
Two days later, on Mother’s Day, he did it again. Paula Newhook watched from the stands as her son scored two more goals to help the Canadiens take the series lead. As Mother’s Day gifts go, two playoff goals at a roaring Bell Centre is a pretty solid effort. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes five playoff goals in total so far, four coming in the last two games and, of course, the Game 7 series-winning goal that knocked the Tampa Bay Lightning out in the first round.
While the playoff goals are fun — lots and lots of fun — Newhook isn’t just finding the back of the net. He won 63% of his faceoffs in Game 3, he’s no stranger to throwing the body around, and clearly he’s top-notch at pumping up his teammates in the locker room and on the ice. As Jake Evans put it after Game 2: “That lineup read depicted how he played tonight. He was relentless the whole night and had to be the fastest guy on the ice out there. He’s just a really, really good playoff player.” Nick Suzuki chimed in saying, “After that first goal, he just continued to dominate the whole game.”
Nobody put Newhook on their playoff bingo card or predicted he’d be the one of the top players carrying the Habs through the playoffs. But nobody back home is complaining either.
As a Newfoundlander, I’ll admit I’m not exactly a neutral observer here. But even setting aside my obvious bias, what Newhook is doing right now is pretty freakin’ exciting. Not only for Canada, given they’re the last Canadian team left standing in the playoffs, but for Newfoundland and Labrador, where 92% of the population are die-hard Habs fans (totally made-up stat, but probably not that far off) — and ahead of Game 3, Newhook was happy to add to those numbers, saying he’s been feeling the love from back home and is “hopefully converting some Leafs fans to Habs fans.”
With fewer than 600,000 people, Newfoundland and Labrador has already given the hockey world names like Dawson Mercer, Michael Ryder, Daniel Cleary, Ryane Clowe, and Teddy Purcell, just to name a few. Newhook grew up idolizing Cleary, who won the Stanley Cup with the Detroit Red Wings in 2008. Three years later, Michael Ryder brought it home after the Boston Bruins won in 2011. And in 2022, it was Newhook’s turn. Thousands lined the streets for the parade and when he addressed the crowd he was, by his own admission, at a total loss for words. Before the parade, he stopped to meet kids from his old youth hockey club and told them to “Keep dreaming, anything is possible.” An 11-year-old at the parade that day said watching a Newfoundlander in the NHL made him believe he could get there too.
That was four years ago. Now he’s back on hockey’s biggest stage, within arms reach of another Cup, this time sporting a Habs jersey and the whole country cheering him on. Let’s bring the Cup back home — not just to Newfoundland, but to Canada. And if that means stolen coffee, shirtless lineup reads, and a few thousand converted Maple Leafs fans … so be it.
