Celebrity couples have always been a thing. There is obviously something about great talent and great wealth that brings people together. But we are now living in a world where sports athletes can also be classified as celebrities – and that has brought forward a whole different genre of relationships.
Football legend Tom Brady married supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and NBA star Dwayne Wade married Hollywood actress Gabrielle Union. There are countless examples of this new type of power couple – and hockey is no different.
Most hockey fans will know where to find out the latest news and where to place their NHL best bets. But these days, they also know more than ever before about the celebrities who mix with their NHL favorites. So, just in case you aren’t up to date with all your hockey-celebrity romances, here are seven celebrities who married NHL players.
Elisha Cuthbert
This Canadian actress will have been well known to people back home after enjoying a successful career as a child. But it was her role in 24 as Kiefer Sutherland’s daughter that really catapulted her to stardom. She then went on to star in a whole host of TV shows and films over the next 20 years.
Cuthbert is a huge hockey fan and had dated Sean Avery when he was playing for the Los Angeles Kings. But she is now happily married to Dan Phaneuf, who was with her hometown Calgary Flames when they met but went on to star for the Toronto Maple Leafs before ending his career in Ottawa and then LA.
Candace Cameron
Talk show panelist and actress, Candace Cameron, is best known for her portrayal of D.J. Tanner – the oldest child in Full House. She then reprised the role in the sequel series, Fuller House. Her brother Kirk was also a teen actor in the hit ABC sitcom Growing Pains.
But in 1996 she met Russian player Valeri Bure, then of the Montreal Canadiens, at a charity hockey game. They were married soon after and now have three children together. Bure eventually retired from the sport to concentrate on his family and allow Cameron to return to acting.
Carrie Underwood
She leapt to stardom when she won the fourth season of American Idol and has gone on to sell 85 million records worldwide as one of the biggest stars of country music. But she lost her heart to a Canadian hockey player and has been happily married since 2010.
Underwood is well known to be a big sports fan and has sung the national anthem before baseball, football, and hockey games. She met Mike Fisher when he was playing for Ottawa but he was later traded to the Nashville Predators, which seems far more suitable for such country music royalty.
Gena Lee Nolin
Moving to Las Vegas in her high school senior year was the catalyst for a jump to stardom for Gena Lee Nolin. Starting off by winning beauty pageants, she soon caught the eye of TV producers and became a star of The Price is Right, The Young and the Restless, and then Baywatch.
Nolin was previously married for eight years but after gaining a divorce from her first husband, she met and married Cale Hulse, who was then playing for the Nashville Predators. The couple have two children together and each has another one from a previous relationship.
Janet Jones
Jones is perhaps best known for her acting roles in The Flamingo Kid and A League of Their Own alongside Madonna and Geena Davis. But her husband is probably even more famous and known to hockey fans around the world as the best to ever play the sport – the Great One, Wayne Gretzky.
The pair first met when Gretzky was a judge on Dance Fever back in 1984. But the two were reacquainted three years later, ironically at an NBA game, and were married in 1988. The ceremony was broadcast live across Canada. The couple have five children, some of whom went on to play sports themselves.
Hilary Duff
Duff was a child actor who found fame at a very young age at the Disney Channel before finding more grown-up roles and turning to a career in music. She had already been the subject of a number of high-profile relationships before she met Mike Comrie, then of the New York Islanders, in the summer of 2007.
The couple were married three years later and had a child together before separating in 2014 and finally getting divorced in 2015. She has since continued to be a star of the small and big screens and is now happily married to singer-songwriter Matthew Korma, with whom she has two children – and one more on the way!
Erin Andrews
Being a sports reporter is one way that someone can be guaranteed to get close to athletes. Erin Andrews has made a career of reporting on the NFL, so there would seem to be little chance of hooking up with hockey players. But she has been happily married to Jarret Stoll since 2017.
The couple had actually been together since 2012 when Stoll was still playing for the Los Angeles Kings. But he had retired by the time the two tied the knot. Andrews and Stoll experienced fertility struggles for years but were finally able to welcome their first son in 2023 via surrogacy.
