The secrets behind Marc-Andre Fleurys top pranks: Frozen clothes, fake dates and toilet hijinks

Publish date: 2024-06-20

Jonathan Marchessault was in his hotel room on the road a few years ago, getting treatment and thinking he was going to have a relaxing off day.

It was the first year for the expansion Vegas Golden Knights and it was a memorable one, as the group of “misfits” shocked the hockey world by reaching the Stanley Cup Final.

Marchessault, Marc-Andre Fleury and a couple of other teammates were lined up to see one of the Golden Knights’ trainers. Fleury had gone first, and as Marchessault got on the table, the veteran goaltender went into the bathroom.

“I didn’t know what he was doing,” Marchessault says.

A few minutes later, the winger went into the bathroom himself. But when he tried to flush, the toilet kept leaking, spraying water everywhere. It was a minor flood.

“I just put towels on the floor,” Marchessault says. “And acted like nothing happened.”

So, too, did Fleury.

“He always denies it,” Marchessault says, laughing. “He acts like we don’t know it’s him. Anytime something happens, we know.”

Fleury, 38, is one of the best goalies of all time, just seven wins shy of second in league history in career wins, behind Hall of Famer Patrick Roy. From the Penguins to the Golden Knights to the Blackhawks and now the Wild, he’s routinely been voted the “best guy in the locker room,” as he was in this year’s NHLPA Player Poll. He’s always smiling. It’s like he’s in on a joke that no one else knows about.

Maybe that’s because he usually is. Fleury also might be the best prankster in the league.

“He’s definitely a dying breed,” says former Penguins teammate and current Wild general manager Bill Guerin.

“A mastermind,” says former Penguins teammate Mike Rupp.

“He’s very talented at hockey and (pranking),” former Penguins teammate Ben Lovejoy says. “He has so many other redeeming qualities that it’s just him being a fun teammate versus being somebody that you despise. He truly is the best.”

Fleury has perfected many smaller pranks. He’ll put shaving cream on towels then neatly fold them so teammates get a foamy surprise when they dry off. (“An oldie,” he quips.) Or dump baby powder into hair dryers. Sometimes he’ll move a teammate’s car several lots away.

And then there are the bigger ones. The all-time pranks. The favorites. The Athletic got the inside scoop from both Fleury and his victims.

The mover

The prank: It was Lovejoy’s rookie season in Pittsburgh, back in 2010-11, and the Penguins were being featured on HBO’s “24/7” series, which took fans behind the scenes leading up to the Winter Classic. Lovejoy recalls a bunch of Penguins players going to dinner at a nice chop house in Buffalo. It was snowy and cold, and Lovejoy was one of the guys walking back to the hotel with Sidney Crosby. Crosby usually sticks around to sign a ton of autographs, but he was in a hurry this time. “At that point, my radar went up that something was off,” Lovejoy says.

Lovejoy and fellow rookie Mark Letestu, who were roommates on the road, got off the elevator onto their floor and were stunned. In the big foyer outside the elevator was a full hotel room setup, from the two beds to the dressers to the TV and lamps. “We walked back into our room and it was completely bare,” Lovejoy recalls. “Nothing was there. It must have taken a ton of work.”

So Lovejoy and Letestu grabbed the mattresses, dresser and TV and brought them back into their room and got ready for bed. A couple of minutes later, the hotel assistant GM knocked on their door. “She was ticked off. She asked if we were going to clean this stuff up,” Lovejoy says. “I looked at her and said, ‘Do you think we did this?’ She looked at me very puzzled. I told her someone at the hotel had given strangers keys to our room and somebody stole all our stuff. Very soon after, we got another knock, and it was the hotel GM apologizing.”

Lovejoy says he’s gotten a million messages about the prank and continues to even in retirement since it aired on HBO and is continuously viewed on YouTube.

“I thought it was funny,” Lovejoy says. “It’s one of (Fleury’s) biggest charms is that he can pull some sort of prank on you and still be this lovable character.”

Fleury’s take: “That’s my favorite one. When you get to the hotel, usually room keys are all on the table in the lobby for the team. Most times, you have two keys. You steal one. I get it right away or save it for when I know he’s out for dinner. Once you’re there, you pull everything out of the room and put it in front of the elevator: bed, the springs, TV. You need some help with that (Matt Cooke and Brent Johnson were among the teammates who helped in Lovejoy’s instance).” It’s not the only hotel room prank Fleury pulls. He says he loves to sneak into someone’s room and crank up the heat. Or call downstairs for a wake-up call at 4 a.m. Sometimes, he’ll put the alarm clock behind the TV and set it for 5 a.m. “They’ll think it’s the TV or the radio. They won’t know what’s going on,” he jokes.

The matchmaker

The prank: It was the 2016-17 season, and the defending Cup champion Penguins were in Tampa for a road game. Rick Tocchet, then a Pittsburgh assistant coach, says Fleury somehow snagged one of their trainers’ iPhones, downloaded the dating app Tinder and set up a profile for the unsuspecting staff member.

Tocchet recalls Fleury’s fake message: “‘I’m (a trainer) for the Penguins, we won the Cup last year, if you want to come to the game,’ That was the long and short of it.

“(Fleury) got her front-row seats, club seats. He rolled out the red carpet for her. They were packing the bus up, and the girl was with the families in that section and waiting. So (the trainer) walks by her and has no clue. She’s like, ‘Do I give him a hug or say hi?’ He was like, ‘What is this girl doing?’ That was all Flower! But they ended up dating for a couple months, so the story turned out really good.”

Fleury’s take: “Really? I did that? Oh yeah, we did that.” How did Fleury get the trainer’s phone? “There’s a lot of free time in our day. Sometimes there’s not much going on,” he says. At least the trainer got a date out of it. Fleury smiled. “That’s something to do at least.”

The painter

The prank: At former Golden Knights teammate Nate Schmidt’s wedding last summer, Nick Holden tried to pull a fast one on Fleury.

Holden, a Senators defenseman who also played with Fleury in Vegas, stole the shoelaces from Fleury’s dress shoes. Fleury laughed at it, but he also remembered. When Ottawa came to St. Paul to face the Wild this season, Fleury wasn’t playing (he backed up Filip Gustavsson). He got Holden’s dress shoes from the Senators’ dressing room and painted one of them red, one of them green: Minnesota Wild colors.

Fleury’s take: “He comes out in the hallway after the game in his running shoes and suit, like nothing had happened.”

The tailor

The prank: Justin Schultz got traded to the Penguins by the Oilers at the trade deadline in 2016, becoming a key addition for an eventual Cup run in Pittsburgh. But the defenseman had to get initiated by Fleury first.

It was Schultz’s first practice with the Penguins. Fleury sneaked into the room and grabbed all of his clothes — shirt, jeans, shoes, etc., and had them put on a hanger and hung from a rope above the ice. Fleury wrote “New Guy” in tape on the back of the jacket.

It wasn’t quite up to the scoreboard, but it was high enough for all of Schultz’s new teammates to see it and laugh.

(Courtesy of Justin Schultz)

“I saw guys looking up, and I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?'” Schultz says. “It took me a little bit. I looked up and am like, ‘Is that my stuff?’ I don’t know if I had even talked to Marc-Andre yet. The back of my jacket said, ‘New Guy,’ so I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely my stuff.'”

The Penguins practiced with Schultz’s clothes hanging above them, though the staff helped the defenseman get them down so he could change afterward. Schultz says Fleury has still never admitted his guilt.

“I thought it was pretty funny,” Schultz says. “It was pretty harmless. I didn’t know at the time he was the big prankster that he is. I guess I found out pretty quickly.”

Fleury’s take: Fleury laughs, saying: “I can’t tell you about that. I’ve done it a few times.” But it’s one of many clothes-related pranks Fleury has pulled. The one many will remember was when Fleury taped all of Crosby’s gear together at the preseason NHL Media Tour. Former Penguins teammate Ian Cole recalls one time in Detroit, where Fleury grabbed all of his teammates’ belts and wrapped them in 10 rolls of clear tape. Ryan Reaves loves the one where Fleury puts a rookie’s clothes in water and then in the freezer. “By the time the kid gets into the room, they’re all frozen,” Reaves says.

The detailer

The prank: This is Sidney Crosby’s favorite. Fleury will take a whole bunch of those plastic packing peanuts — the ones used to protect fragile stuff in boxes — and fill a teammate’s car with them, from floor to sunroof.

“The image I have in my mind is him standing on a sunroof getting the last bag of packing peanuts in there,” Crosby says, laughing.

Fleury’s take: “I did that a lot in Pittsburgh. Last year, someone did that to (Connor Dewar) here. His car was full.” It’s not his only prank involving vehicles. There’s the one moving a teammate’s car somewhere a mile away. Or he’ll tie cans to the rear bumper so they clank on the ground “like a wedding.” But the most foul? “One year, we had a team party at the end of the year, and I asked the chef for leftover fish,” Fleury says. “I put the fish in a container and under someone’s car seat. It was nice and warm out. We had someone pick up the car the next day, and it had sat in the sun all day. It stank so bad!”

Fleury says he picked up some of these pranks when he was a young player in the league and saw veterans like Ryan Malone pulling them off.

“It’s kind of a dying thing, but I learned from them,” Fleury says. “After the game, you come in and your tie is cut. You come in, and every button on your shirt is missing. You put your underwear on and there’s a hole in front. The tip of your socks are cut. Little s—. After games, your shoes are screwed with, stuff are screwed to the top of the locker stall.

“It’s all in good fun.”

But as Fleury learned from his predecessors, his teammates have taken a page from him.

And they got him back.

It was at Schmidt’s wedding last summer.

Reaves tells the story best. “I’m snitching on myself,” he jokes. Right before the wedding, they rigged the toilet in Fleury’s room, where the tube in the back of it was sticking out. It would have been the perfect payback for Fleury.

The only problem?

Fleury’s wife, Veronique, used the bathroom first to get ready. So she bore the brunt of it.

“She was pissed at me,” Fleury says, laughing. “She’s like, ‘You stupid idiot and your stupid friends do all this stuff and now I’m all wet trying to get ready for the wedding.'”

Fleury smiles.

“What do you call that? Collateral damage?”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)