What Is a Hat Trick in Hockey? I Counted 485 NHL Hat Tricks

A hat trick in hockey is when one player scores three goals in the same game. The goals don't have to come in a row, and they can come in any period, including overtime. When the third one goes in, fans throw their hats on the ice. That's the whole definition.

What I wanted to know is how often it actually happens and what a typical one looks like. So I went through the NHL's play-by-play for every regular-season game from 2021-22 through 2025-26, 6,560 games in all, and found 485 hat tricks. That's about one every 13 or 14 games. My count matches Hockey-Reference's hat trick list for every one of those seasons, game for game.

The numbers turned up a few things I didn't expect. Nearly a third of those hat tricks were finished off with an empty-net goal. Three out of four were completed in the third period. And the scorer's team almost never lost.

The Hat Trick in Plain English

Three goals, one player, one game. The rest is detail:

• Any three goals count. Even strength, power play, shorthanded, empty net and overtime goals all count.

• Shootout goals don't. Under Rule 84.4 of the NHL's 2026-27 rulebook, the player who scores the shootout winner "will not be credited with a goal scored in his personal statistics." No goal credited means no hat trick.

• Four or more goals still counts as one hat trick. Hockey-Reference's hat trick lists, which I checked my count against, include four- and five-goal games as single hat tricks.

• The hats are legal. Rule 63.5 says a team can get a bench minor if fans keep throwing things on the ice, but "articles thrown onto the ice following a special occasion (i.e. hat trick) will not result in a bench minor penalty being assessed." It's the only place the rulebook mentions a hat trick.

The Three Kinds of Hat Trick

A natural hat trick is the purist's version. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as three consecutive goals in a single game. I counted a hat trick as natural if the player scored three straight goals in the game with no goal by either team in between. Only about one in eight hat tricks (13%) in my data met that bar.

The Gordie Howe hat trick is a joke that turned into a tradition. It's not an official NHL stat, and the man it's named after barely ever did it. Sportsnet counts two in Howe's career, on October 11, 1953 and March 21, 1954, both against Toronto. I counted one any time a player had at least one goal, at least one assist and a fighting major in the same game, which happened 65 times in the five seasons. Mark Scheifele and Tom Wilson had three each, the most of anyone.

Where the Name Came From

The term is older than the NHL, and it didn't start in hockey. According to NHL.com, the first hat trick came in cricket in 1858, when bowler H.H. Stephenson took three wickets on three straight balls in Sheffield, England. A collection was taken up and used to buy him a hat.

Hockey picked it up later. The same NHL.com story says "hat trick" showed up in some newspapers in the 1930s and early 1940s, but the Hockey Hall of Fame credits a Toronto hat shop owner named Sammy Taft. On January 26, 1946, Chicago's Alex Kaleta walked into Taft's shop, liked a fedora and couldn't afford it. Taft told him he could have it free if he scored three goals against the Maple Leafs that night. Kaleta scored four, in a 6-5 loss.

There's a rival claim from Montreal. The hat store Henri Henri says it gave a free hat to players who scored three goals at the Forum between 1950 and 1970, and NPR reported in 2026 that the debate between the two shops is still unsettled. Either way, fans took the idea over and started throwing their own hats.

How Often Hat Tricks Happen

Here's every NHL regular season in my data:

So if you go to about 14 NHL games, you'd expect to see one. Some seasons are a lot better than others. The 2023-24 season had 115, and Auston Matthews had six of them on his own. Per Hockey-Reference's single-season list, nobody had scored that many in a season since Mario Lemieux had six in 1995-96. The next season dropped to 77.

Five-goal games are much rarer. There were two in these five seasons: Timo Meier for San Jose against Los Angeles on January 17, 2022, and Tage Thompson for Buffalo at Columbus on December 7, 2022.

What 485 Hat Tricks Show

This is the part I found most interesting.

The empty net is a hat trick's best friend. In 156 of the 485 hat tricks, the goal that completed it went into an empty net, after the other team had pulled its goalie for an extra attacker. That's almost one in three. All 156 came in the third period, 149 of them in the last five minutes, and in every one the scorer's team was already ahead when he scored.

Most hat tricks are finished late. Three out of four were completed in the third period, and only 12 were done in the first. The empty-netters are a big part of that: take them out and the third period still has 207 of the remaining 329.

A hat trick almost always means a win. The scorer's team won 439 of the 485 games and lost 46. Three goals from one player is usually enough on its own, and the 156 empty-net finishers all came with the team already leading.

The goalie doesn't always see all three. Steve played goalie, so I looked at this one from his end too. Only 277 hat tricks (57%) had all three goals go past the same goalie. In the rest, at least one goal went into an empty net or came after a goalie change. The goalie in net for the most full hat tricks in these five seasons was Andrei Vasilevskiy, with 10.

Defensemen almost never do it. Only 12 of the 485 came from a defenseman. One of them was Rasmus Dahlin, who scored three for the Sabres in a 7-4 win over Toronto on January 27, 2026.

Who Scored the Most

As a Sabres fan, I'll take Thompson at No. 2. Buffalo had 22 hat tricks in these five seasons, fifth most in the league behind Edmonton (27), Colorado (24), Toronto (24) and Boston (23), and Thompson had nine of them. His five-goal game in Columbus was the big one. He had four goals by 16:40 of the first period, tying the NHL record for goals in a period, and NHL.com noted he joined Dave Andreychuk (February 6, 1986) as the only Sabres players with five goals in a game. Buffalo won 9-4. Seattle had the fewest hat tricks of any team that played all five seasons, with four.

The Records

Behind Gretzky on the career list are Mario Lemieux (40), Mike Bossy (39) and Alex Ovechkin (34). Ovechkin passed Brett Hull for fourth with a hat trick against Utah on March 26, 2026, which NHL.com noted was his second of that season at age 40.

Mosienko's record is the one I can't see falling. Playing for Chicago against the Rangers in the last game of the 1951-52 season, he scored at 6:09, 6:20 and 6:30 of the third period, according to NHL.com. The fastest hat trick in my 485 was Joel Eriksson Ek's for Minnesota against San Jose on April 9, 2025. It took 2 minutes and 18 seconds, more than six times as long.

And Malone's seven-goal game ended with a natural hat trick. NHL.com says he scored his last three in the third period on Toronto's relief goalie.

Quick Answers

How many goals is a hat trick in hockey? Three goals by one player in one game. Four or more still counts as a hat trick.

Does a shootout goal count toward a hat trick? No. Shootout goals aren't credited to the player who scores them, so they can't complete a hat trick.

What is a natural hat trick? Three straight goals by the same player with no goal by either team in between.

What is a Gordie Howe hat trick? A goal, an assist and a fight in the same game. It isn't an official NHL stat.

Why do fans throw hats after a hat trick? The tradition grew out of hat shops in Toronto and Montreal giving free hats to players who scored three goals. Fans took it over, and the NHL rulebook specifically exempts hat-trick hats from the delay-of-game bench minor.

Final Thoughts

A hat trick is simple: three goals, one player, one game. In the NHL it happens about once every 13 or 14 games, the scorer's team wins about nine times out of ten, and almost a third of them get finished into an empty net. So if you've got a hat on and a player on your team has two goals late in a game he's winning, keep an eye on the other bench.

How I got the numbers: I used the NHL's public play-by-play feed (api-web.nhle.com) for all 6,560 regular-season games from 2021-22 through 2025-26 and counted every player with three or more non-shootout goals in a game. My count for each season matches Hockey-Reference's hat trick lists exactly (102, 96, 115, 77 and 95), down to the date and goal total of every game. The natural hat trick, Gordie Howe hat trick, empty-net and goalie counts are my own from the same feed. They aren't official NHL stats. Playoff games aren't included.

If you want more hockey rules and numbers, I did the same kind of breakdown for a power play, icing and how long a hockey game lasts. Since 28 of these hat tricks were finished in overtime, here's how overtime works in hockey. For a different take on scoring, I compared 70 goals and 100 assists. And if you want the basketball version of a big stat line, here's what a double-double is.

Sources:

• NHL: Official Rules 2026-27

• NHL play-by-play feed (example game)

• Hockey-Reference: NHL hat tricks, 2025-26

• Hockey-Reference: Career leaders for hat tricks

• Hockey-Reference: Single-season leaders for hat tricks

• NHL.com: Hockey's 'hat trick' traces roots to cricket

• NPR: A history of hat tricks in sports

• Cambridge Dictionary: Natural hat trick

• Sportsnet: The great myth of the Gordie Howe hat trick

• NHL.com: Mosienko scores fastest hat trick in NHL history

• Guinness World Records: Fastest NHL hat-trick

• NHL.com: Malone's 7-goal game remains NHL record 106 years later

• NHL.com: Ovechkin sets NHL mark with hat trick against 21st franchise

• NHL.com: Thompson scores five of nine Sabres goals in win against Blue Jackets

• Buffalo Sabres: Single-season records