Jacob Fowler

Jacob Fowler grew up four hours from the nearest ice rink, and his mother would leave work at noon every week to drive him to practice in Florida. Sunday nights, they drove home, arriving at midnight. The Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup the year he was born — 2004 — in the same state where finding a sheet of ice meant planning your week around it. That backstory, equal parts sacrifice and circumstance, is where the Montreal Canadiens' goaltender began.

Fowler was born in Melbourne, Florida, on November 24, 2004. He catches left, stands 6'1", and wears No. 32. The Canadiens selected him in the third round, 69th overall, in the 2023 NHL Draft. His path to that selection ran through multiple sports — basketball, soccer, lacrosse, baseball — because hockey in Florida was not always available. "From a young age, I just played other sports," he said on Episode 339 of the InGoal Radio Podcast. "I was kind of taught to just play what was available to me. Hockey was kind of on the side. But it just forced me to cherish every opportunity I got on the ice." ^[1]

His father came to hockey late in life, picking up the game somewhere in his thirties or early forties, and Fowler's earliest memories are of watching his dad at the rink. He got his first pair of mini skates as soon as he could walk. His path to the crease, specifically, came in stages. He played goal occasionally in house league but spent time as a forward too. The turn came, by his own account, out of frustration with losing. He told his father he could do better than the goalie on his team, took the net, and didn't look back. The moment that cemented it was a Marc-André Fleury save — the double-push stop on Nicklas Lidstrom in the 2009 Stanley Cup Final. "That save made me a goalie," he told InGoal Radio, recalling how he later sent the clip to Canadiens goalie coach Marco Marciano ^[1].

Marciano's connection to Fleury runs deep — he coached Fleury with the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles and worked with him through much of his career. Fowler's first NHL head coach was Martin St. Louis, who recorded 24 points in 23 playoff games on that 2004 Stanley Cup-winning Lightning team. His first NHL game was against the Pittsburgh Penguins — the franchise whose goalies he idolized growing up. Colin Hodd's March 2026 InGoal article examined those converging threads and what they do — and don't — tell us about Fowler's journey to the NHL ^[2].

Without a dedicated goalie coach through much of his development, Fowler worked around what he had. "There was really no technicality to my game. It was kind of just, there's a puck and I was the guy that wasn't supposed to let it past me," he said ^[1]. He watched overhead camera angles on the NHL app with his father, absorbed what he could from clinics, and leaned on his background as a multi-sport athlete. Playing other sports, he said, contributed to his ability to make unorthodox saves when called upon.

Fowler signed out of college at the end of the 2024–25 season and joined the Canadiens' pro setup, working with Marciano as his first professional goalie coach. He described those first weeks as a learning process: arriving confident after college, encountering the pace of professional hockey, and choosing to treat it as daily development work. "I was a young kid, I was 20 years old. I thought when I signed that I was ready to make every save in pro hockey and you get to your first practice and you kind of get lit up pretty good," he said on the podcast, "and you kind of have a decision to make of whether you're gonna go down or you're gonna get better every day." ^[1]

In the 2025–26 season — his first in the NHL — Fowler has appeared in 17 games for Montreal, posting a record of 9–6–2 with a 2.43 goals-against average, a .908 save percentage, and one shutout over 1,010:42 of ice time.

InGoal Magazine has covered Jacob Fowler in one podcast appearance and one InGoal article. Episode 339 of the InGoal Radio Podcast features Fowler in a conversation with Kevin Woodley covering his Florida upbringing, his path to goaltending, the multi-sport background that shaped his game, and his early experience in professional hockey ^[1]. Colin Hodd's accompanying article traces those same threads — the Lightning, the Fleury save, Marciano, the Penguins — and what they mean, or don't mean, for how we tell a goaltender's story ^[2].

"I've been fortunate to have a lot of opportunity at an early age," Fowler said. "And now it's, what can I do to keep improving every day that in a year, three years, ten years, that you don't leave anything on the table." ^[1]