Logan Cooley Reached Five Hat Tricks Faster Than Ovechkin Did

There is a particular cruelty in playing the game of your life in the building where your career started and walking out a loser. The Bell Centre is where Arizona took Logan Cooley third overall at the 2022 draft. On Thursday night, back in that building with Utah, Cooley scored three goals — the fifth hat trick of his career, reached in his 228th game, two games faster than Alex Ovechkin got to five — set up the fourth, was named the game's third star, and still watched Cole Caufield beat his team 30 seconds into overtime.

The night itself was loud from the start. Cooley scored twice in the first period, the first at 1:42, as Utah jumped out 2-0 before the game was ten minutes old. Montreal kept erasing leads; Cooley kept rebuilding them. His third, at 11:05 of the second period, came on the power play — Utah went 3-for-5 with the man advantage — and his assist, also on the power play, set up Nick Schmaltz. He needed exactly three shots to do it — every shot Cooley took beat Jakub Dobes. He had a hand in every Utah goal in a 5-4 overtime loss, in a game where Utah was outshot 35-20. Rookie Adam Engstrom's first career goal tied it for Montreal late in the third, and Caufield finished a 2-on-1 in the first minute of the extra period. The three stars told the story of the night: Nick Suzuki, back after missing six games with a hand injury, first; Caufield second; Cooley third. Utah drops to 10-6-1.

The company he just passed

The loss does not get the last word, because the milestone is the kind that survives a bad night. That was Cooley's fifth career hat trick, and it came in his 228th NHL game. Per the NHL's own tally, that makes him the fastest active player to five hat tricks — ahead of Alex Ovechkin, who needed 230 games to reach five. It was also his second hat trick in four games: he hung three on Pittsburgh in an overtime win last Thursday, and he now shares the league lead for hat tricks this season with Brady Tkachuk and Cutter Gauthier. His 11 goals tie Auston Matthews for fifth in the NHL.

The heater, by the numbers

This is not one hot week doing all the work, but the week helps. Over his last five games Cooley has eight goals and ten points; over his last ten, eleven goals and fifteen points. On the season he sits at 11 goals and 21 points in 17 games. The frame for it: his career high is 25 goals, set across 75 games in Utah's first season in 2024-25. He is more than two-fifths of the way there before the middle of November, at 22 years old, in his fifth season since going third overall. The full scoring table is in the Stats Hub, and the rest of Thursday's slate is in the nightly roundup.

Utah's problem is not Cooley, and Thursday made that plain in both directions. A team that gets a point from its best player on every single goal and still loses has a depth problem, not a star problem: the Mammoth were outshot 35-20, leaned on a hot power play for three of their four goals, and could not protect a lead three separate times. The good news travels: Cooley is producing like this on the road, against good teams, in loud buildings — Montreal is 10-3-3 and tied this game three times rather than folding. Utah goes to Ottawa on Saturday, and the question waiting there is the same one Montreal asked: who scores when Cooley doesn't? For one night, at least, nobody had to — and it still wasn't enough. That is the tension Utah carries into the weekend: the face of the franchise has arrived ahead of schedule, and the team around him is still catching up.