Did Team USA hockey captain Auston Matthews go off the rails during a postgame interview, slamming Canada? No, that's not true: Video of Matthews' interview after the Feb. 22, 2026, Olympic gold medal game shows that he never called out Canada for having a prime minister who wore blackface and is dating Katy Perry. Nor did Matthews say that Canadian rapper Drake was a pedophile.
The claim appeared in a February 22, 2026, post on X.com account @RealRobReinhart (archived here). It opened:
Team USA captain Auston Matthews on what he told the team during the pre-OT intermission:
"They're telling us we're bad people because of our government or whatever...that isn't us at all. Their last prime minister did blackface, divorced his wife, and then started banging Katy Perry...who can't sell tickets to her shows anymore. Their biggest star [Drake] is a certified pedophile. So you tell me who's in worse shape. Let's go out there and remind them who we really are."
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from X.)
The NHL posted a 20-minute video on their YouTube page (archived here) titled "USA Men's Hockey Gold Medal Press Conference" that showed comments from players and the coach after the gold medal game Feb. 22, 2026. Nowhere in the video did Matthews say the quote attributed to him in the tweet.
Lead Stories searched the transcript for the keywords "prime minister," "blackface" and "pedophile" and did not find any matches. Matthews did not make comments about Canada, the prime minister, Katy Perry or Drake.
Had Matthews made the comments, it would have been national and international news. Lead Stories searched Google (archived here) and Yahoo! News (archived here) and did not find any news stories reporting on the inflammatory comments.
