The Florida Panthers have carved out a place in NHL history with a scoring burst no team had ever managed before.
On Saturday, in an 8-3 win over the Seattle Kraken, Carter Verhaeghe and Sam Bennett both completed hat tricks, with Verhaeghe’s three-goal night locking in the league record. Florida became the first team in NHL history to post natural hat tricks in three straight games.
A natural hat trick means one player scores three goals in a row without anyone else on either team breaking up the sequence. That’s the kind of run that usually feels impossible to sustain, and yet the Panthers kept it going all week.
The streak started last Tuesday in a 7-3 victory over the Columbus Blue Jackets, when Brady Tkachuk scored three times in the second period. It was his first goal as a Panther, and his older brother, Matthew Tkachuk, assisted on all three.
Tkachuk followed that up with another natural hat trick against the Vancouver Canucks on Thursday. His third goal came in overtime and finished off a 3-2 win, giving Florida back-to-back games with natural hat tricks before Verhaeghe added the next chapter against Seattle.
Verhaeghe scored three times across the first and second periods against the Kraken, pushing the Panthers into the record book. Bennett then added his own hat trick in the same game, including his first goal of the season, underscoring just how many weapons Florida has been rolling out on offense.
The Panthers’ feat also puts them in rare company beyond the exact record. Per NHL Stats, Florida is only the third team in the last 30 years to post a hat trick of any kind in three straight games. The 1992 Calgary Flames and the 1982 Edmonton Oilers both had stretches of four straight games with hat tricks, though neither matched what Florida just pulled off with natural hat tricks in three consecutive contests.
Florida now has four hat tricks this season, which matches its total from the previous three regular seasons combined.
The Panthers head to Ottawa next, where they’ll face the Senators on Wednesday with the chance to keep this wild scoring stretch alive.
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What made this outburst even more notable is that he shared the spotlight with Sam Bennett in a way the Panthers had never seen before. It was the first time in franchise history that two Florida players each scored a natural hat trick in the same game, a rare kind of offensive eruption that says plenty about how well the top end of the lineup is clicking right now. [Read more 🡒]