Sports · NEWS EXPLAINER
Panthers beat Kraken 8–3: two hat tricks and an NHL-first natural-hat-trick streak
Carter Verhaeghe scored three straight Florida goals and Sam Bennett added another hat trick as the Panthers beat Seattle 8–3. The win made Florida the first NHL team with a natural hat trick in three consecutive games.
The Florida Panthers beat the Seattle Kraken 8–3 on October 17 behind hat tricks from Carter Verhaeghe and Sam Bennett. Verhaeghe’s three goals were consecutive Florida goals, making his a natural hat trick; Bennett completed the second three-goal performance of the night in the third period.
The larger record stretches across three games. Brady Tkachuk had natural hat tricks in Florida’s previous two wins, so Verhaeghe’s sequence made the Panthers the first NHL team to produce a natural hat trick in three consecutive games. The record concerns the order of one player’s goals within the team’s scoring, not simply three hat tricks on three dates.
How the 8–3 game turned
Bennett opened the scoring 1:05 into the first period, but Shane Wright tied it for Seattle at 4:54. Verhaeghe then scored at 17:56 and again on the power play at 19:07, giving Florida a 3–1 lead after the first period.
Verhaeghe completed his hat trick at 6:02 of the second period after collecting the rebound from Niko Mikkola’s wraparound attempt. Mikkola scored 40 seconds later, and Bennett’s second goal at 13:13 pushed the lead to 6–1 before Frederick Gaudreau answered late in the period.
Why Verhaeghe’s hat trick was “natural”
A natural hat trick means one player scores three consecutive goals for the player’s team, with no teammate scoring between them. Verhaeghe supplied Florida’s second, third and fourth goals, so the sequence qualifies even though Seattle scored before the run began.
The first two goals came 71 seconds apart late in the first period. The third arrived 6:02 into the second, less than nine minutes of game time after the first. That sequence is separate from Bennett’s hat trick, which was spread across all three periods.
Bennett made it two hat tricks in one game
Bennett scored at 1:05 of the first, 13:13 of the second and 11:14 of the third. His third goal produced the 8–3 final and gave Florida two hat-trick scorers in the same game for the first time in franchise history.
Sam Reinhart also scored on the power play, while Mikkola finished with a goal and an assist. Matthew Tkachuk had three assists, Brady Tkachuk had two, and Jacob Markstrom made 20 saves. Seattle’s other goals came from Gaudreau and Ryker Evans.
The three-game record needs the exact definition
Brady Tkachuk scored natural hat tricks against Columbus on October 13 and Vancouver on October 15. Verhaeghe’s natural hat trick against Seattle extended that team streak to three games, which the NHL and both independent reports identified as a league first.
Florida has four hat tricks across the three games because Bennett added a conventional hat trick on Saturday. The three-game NHL record is specifically the natural-hat-trick streak; the count of four also shows why “three hat tricks in three games” would undersell what happened.
What the result changed
Florida improved to 5–2–2 and won its third straight game. Seattle fell to 5–3–1 and completed its five-game trip at 3–1–1. The Panthers led 3–1 after the first period and 6–2 after the second, so the record-setting sequence also created the decisive separation.
The next games listed by the AP report are Seattle hosting Detroit on Tuesday and Florida visiting Ottawa on Wednesday. Those are schedule checkpoints, not guarantees about lineups; injury and roster updates should be checked closer to puck drop.
