This paper investigates the transformation of Hamiltonian structures under sampling. It is shown that the exact sampled-data equivalent model associated to a given port-Hamiltonian continuous-time dynamics exhibits a discrete-time representation in terms of the discrete gradient, with the same energy function but modified damping and interconnection matrices. By construction, the proposed sampled-data dynamics guarantees exact matching of both the state evolutions and the energy-balance at all sampling instants. Its generalization to port-controlled Hamiltonian dynamics leads to characterize a new power conjugate output which recovers the average-passivating output. On these bases, energy-management control strategies are proposed. An energetic interpretation is confirmed by its description in the Dirac formalism. Two classical examples are worked out to validate the proposed sampleddata modeling in a comparative way with the literature.