Cutter Gauthier's 3rd hat trick in 5 games sinks Penguins
TLDR: Cutter Gauthier scored his 3rd hat trick in 5 games as the Ducks beat the Penguins 5-2, stretching his goal streak to 6 games with 13 goals in that span.
Mikael Granlund opened the scoring Sunday, jumping on a weak clear after a blocked shot. Then the Gauthier show started, with a power-play goal that went 5-hole on Arturs Silovs.
That goal pushed his streak to 6 straight games, tied for the longest in the NHL this season. Not long after, he timed a run through basically the whole Pittsburgh defense and made it 3-0. Keep in mind this is a guy who had 2 goals in his first 11 games, and both of them came in the same night. Now he's scoring at a pace that has the Ducks' own beat writers going back to the franchise record books.
Cutter Gauthier had two goals in his first 11 games, both coming in one contest. With two more tonight, he's on a six-game goal streak with 12 piled up over than run. Don't think it's too early to wonder if he'll be Anaheim's first 50-goal scorer since Corey Perry.
Corey Perry is the last Duck to hit 50, and nobody's wondering that out loud about Gauthier because of 1 hot week. The 50-goal question is on the table because he hasn't cooled off at all. The power play is the engine. During his streak most of his goals have come with the extra man, and Anaheim has scored on 18 of its last 33 power-play chances. Jackson LaCombe is feeding all of it, too: he picked up an assist for a 10th straight game, which ties the team record Ryan Getzlaf and Perry set in 2009.
It wasn't a clean night everywhere else. Kris Letang and Rickard Rakell got Pittsburgh back into it, and Laurent Brossoit had to make 32 saves to keep it from getting close. Tristan Luneau added a goal, and Gauthier finished things off with an empty-netter with 34 seconds left to make it 5-2 and get the hats on the ice.
With that, he became the first player in NHL history to score 3 hat tricks in the first 10 days of a calendar month. Phil Esposito held the old mark, 3 in 13 days in December 1970. We're only 8 days into November. Joel Quenneville had the best line of the night afterward.
Quenneville on #FlyTogether Gauthier: "He's got the magic touch. He scores big goals at big times. He's got some deceptiveness with his release ... guys are getting him the puck in good areas, he finds it in some interesting places. But, yeah, he's hot as a firecracker."
Quenneville also said his team gave up way too much and admitted the power play is carrying them right now, which is a fair warning about a 5-game win streak that depends on 1 unit staying this hot. Anaheim is 10-7-1, and Gauthier has 17 points during an 8-game point streak. Next up is a 7th straight game with a goal, which would give him the longest goal streak in the league this season outright, and right now it's hard to bet against him.
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