Two teammates scoring hat tricks in the same game is the stat everyone grabbed onto after Florida's 8-3 rout of Seattle on Saturday, and it's the one worth the least.
Carter Verhaeghe and Sam Bennett each put up three against the Kraken at Amerant Bank Arena, the first time two Panthers had done it in the same night. Nice line in the franchise record book. But don't let the hat-throwing chaos fool you into thinking you watched something unprecedented across the sport. St. Louis got it from Buchnevich and Schenn in 2023. Boston got it from Zacha and Khusnutdinov this past January. Edmonton did it with Nugent-Hopkins and Draisaitl in 2019 and with Coffey and Kurri all the way back in 1985. Ottawa had Alfredsson and Havlat in 2005. The feat shows up every so often, spread across decades and franchises. It's uncommon.
So if that's the headline you came for, lower the bar on your amazement a notch.
This two-man show was the capstone of a three-game binge in which the Panthers became the first team in NHL history to produce a natural hat trick in three consecutive games. Stack it with everything else and Florida is the first team in over 100 years to rack up four hat tricks before its 10th game of a season, and only the second team in the past 105 years to get four or more hat tricks in any three-game span at all. The only team that matched that pace was the 1981 Quebec Nordiques, who once produced three hat tricks across two games with the Stastny brothers and Jacques Richard. That's the company Florida is keeping right now: a scoring run only one team in a century has matched.
Credit a forward group that's burying teams in bunches, and Bennett and Verhaeghe specifically, two players who keep making the rest of the league look slow. Bennett, who Calgary shipped out for a second-round pick and a prospect, keeps making that trade look worse by the week. Calgary can keep thinking about that one.
A lopsided October win doesn't hand anyone a trophy. Florida won back-to-back Stanley Cups and then missed the playoffs entirely last season while Carolina lifted the Cup. Banners and box scores are different currencies. Eight goals on a Saturday in October buys you nothing in June.
Which is exactly why the hat-trick-parade framing undersells what's happening. A team doesn't accidentally score at a rate nobody's touched in a hundred years. The Panthers, 5-2-2 with a third straight win in hand, are telling the league the firepower that won those two Cups didn't evaporate with a lost season. The two-hat-trick night is a fun photo, but the three-game run underneath it is the warning.
