The duo earned a personal best 77.75 points in their Olympic debut.
“There’s a lot of expectations that you can put on yourself,” Hubbell said. “Certainly we wanted to skate our best, but we just tried to do what we trained to do. We’ve been working so hard, to get rewarded for that is a great feeling.”
Maia and Alex Shibutani are in fourth place just .02 points behind with 77.73 points.
"I haven't had a chance to analyze everything, but right now I feel really proud of how we did,” Alex Shibutani said. “The score is better than in the team event and I just felt that the performance was so natural. We had a lot of fun out there."
Madison Chock and Evan Bates earned 75.45 points in their short dance and are in seventh place, though less than three points separates seventh through third place.
"We were really happy with our performance,” Chock said. “We made some changes to our program since the [U.S. championships]. I think we debuted it very well. We were happy to put out a good skate."
The free dance will get underway on Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. (Monday, 8 p.m. ET).
