Cutter Gauthier Nets Third November Hat Trick

The game turned on a failed Pittsburgh power play early in the second. The Penguins held a five-on-three advantage for 1:37, called their timeout to rest their top players, and still could not score. Anaheim’s power play answered almost immediately. Gauthier made it 2-0 at 6:28 of the second with a no-look power-play shot that fooled everyone expecting a pass, then scored again at 9:11, circling out, accelerating straight to the net and ripping a wrist shot past Arturs Silovs for a 3-0 lead. Granlund set up both goals, LaCombe and Beckett Sennecke adding the second assists.

Tristan Luneau pushed the lead to 4-0 on the power play at 5:12 of the third, scoring from the point through traffic. Pittsburgh’s push came late and came with the goalie pulled: Kris Letang broke Laurent Brossoit’s shutout at 8:05 on a six-on-four power play, his first goal of the season, and Rickard Rakell made it 4-2 at 13:42, converting a Sidney Crosby pass with Silovs again on the bench. Gauthier closed it at 19:26, hitting the empty net from long range to complete the hat trick. The wire recap of the game credits Gauthier with three goals and an assist, Granlund with a goal and three assists, LaCombe with three assists, and Brossoit with 32 saves on 34 shots, while Silovs stopped 20 of 24 for Pittsburgh and Evgeni Malkin recorded two assists.

The Cutter Gauthier Hat Trick Run, By The Dates

The Cutter Gauthier hat trick count for November now stands at three, and the dates are the story: Sunday, November 1 against Ottawa, Tuesday, November 3 at Vancouver, and Sunday, November 8 against Pittsburgh. Three hat tricks in eight days. The first two made history on their own: NHL.com’s recap of the Vancouver game records that Gauthier became the first player in Ducks history with back-to-back hat tricks, and the first player in NHL history to score multiple power-play goals in three straight games. Between those hat tricks and this one, he scored once in Edmonton on November 5, becoming the first Duck to score nine goals in a four-game span, and once in Calgary on November 6, the game-winner with 1:34 remaining that made him the first Ducks player to score 10 goals in a five-game span and the seventh NHL player in 30 years to do it.

Add Sunday’s three and the full run reads 13 goals in six games, starting with two power-play goals against Buffalo on October 29 that ended a nine-game drought. Gauthier’s season total is now 15: the NHL’s official game-day preview listed him at 12 goals before puck drop, 10 of them in the five-game streak he carried into the night. Three hat tricks in eight days is rare enough that the feat has a 40-year-old reference point in the record books: Petri Skriko recorded three hat tricks in eight days for Vancouver in November 1986, a stretch that made him the first Canuck named NHL Player of the Month.

Gauthier’s own explanation for the run has stayed plain through all of it. “Just keeping it simple and shooting the puck,” he said after the Calgary game. “The more times you shoot the puck, the odds of it going in are more in your favor, so keep it pretty simple. Shoot it.” On Sunday Gauthier put six shots on goal, and three of them beat Silovs or found the empty net.

Ducks Score Five For An Eighth Straight Game

Gauthier’s night sits inside a team streak that is just as unusual. NHL.com’s preview noted before the game that Anaheim had scored at least five goals in each of its past seven games, making the Ducks the fourth team in 40 years to score at least five in seven straight. Scoring five against Pittsburgh extends that streak to eight games, and Sportsnet’s report of the game records that the Ducks became the first team since the 1988-89 Los Angeles Kings to score at least five goals in eight consecutive games. The eight games: Philadelphia (5-4, October 24), Vancouver (a 6-5 overtime loss, October 27), Buffalo (a 7-6 loss, October 29), Ottawa (6-3), Vancouver again (5-4), Edmonton (5-4), Calgary (5-3) and now Pittsburgh (5-2). The streak began with two losses; the last five games of it are all wins.

The power play is the engine. Anaheim scored three power-play goals on four chances on Sunday, and its Granlund, Gauthier and Sennecke line drove the game as well: Granlund finished with four points against his former team, LaCombe added three assists from the blue line and tied a Ducks record with an assist in his 10th consecutive game, and Sennecke set up Gauthier’s second goal. Pittsburgh, playing the second game of a back-to-back after a 5-2 win in Los Angeles on Saturday, fell to 6-10-2 and managed only the two late six-on-four goals after falling behind 4-0.

What The Night Leaves Behind

Anaheim improves to 10-7-1 with five straight wins and sits seventh in the Western Conference. The Ducks are back at Honda Center on Wednesday, November 11, when they host the Nashville Predators at 10:00 p.m. ET, and the question travelling with them is now a weekly one: how long the scoring streak, and Gauthier’s run inside it, can actually last. Pittsburgh visits the San Jose Sharks the same night.

For one night, the numbers are simple enough to state plainly. Three hat tricks in eight days, 13 goals in six games, 15 goals on the season, and a team that has scored five goals in eight straight games, a run no team had matched since 1988-89. Gauthier had two goals in his first 11 games this season before the run started on October 29; since then, almost everything he shoots is going in.