- Carter Verhaeghe’s natural hat trick makes Florida the first team in NHL history with one in three straight games
- Sam Bennett added a hat trick of his own in an 8-3 win over Seattle
- Read below for how the Panthers got here and what Brady Tkachuk did to start it
The Florida Panthers are running out of hats.
Carter Verhaeghe scored a natural hat trick Saturday in an 8-3 win over the Seattle Kraken, making the Panthers the first team in NHL history to have a player record one in three straight games, per NHL.com.
Watch the Panthers make history:
Verhaeghe finished the first period with a pair, the second at 19:07 on the power play, then scored his third straight goal at 6:02 of the second to make it 4-1. Nobody else scored in between.
Brady Tkachuk started the run. He had a natural hat trick in Tuesday’s 7-3 win over Columbus, then scored all three goals in Thursday’s 3-2 overtime win over Vancouver. Only Petri Skriko in 1986 and Cy Denneny in 1923 had done it in back-to-back games before him.
Tkachuk had a chance to make it three in a row Saturday and came up short, but he still had two assists. One of them set up Sam Bennett’s second goal.
Bennett opened the scoring 1:05 into the game, then added a goal at 13:13 of the second and finished his hat trick at 11:14 of the third on a one-timer off a Uvis Balinskis feed. That made it four hat tricks in three games for Florida.
Check out the Bennett goal that sealed it:
Before Saturday, the Panthers had never had two players score a hat trick in the same game. Sam Reinhart and Niko Mikkola each had a goal and an assist, Matthew Tkachuk had three assists, and Jacob Markstrom stopped 20 shots.
Shane Wright, Frederick Gaudreau and Ryker Evans scored for Seattle, which had gone 3-0-1 over its previous four games. Joey Daccord made 29 saves in the loss.
Florida is 5-2-2 and has won three straight. Our earlier look at Tkachuk’s second straight hat trick now reads like the opening act.
