Batherson Completes Hat Trick by Blocking a Shot Into an Empty Net

TL;DR: Drake Batherson completed his third career hat trick in the strangest way possible on Saturday night, blocking an Adam Fox shot in Ottawa’s own zone and watching it travel the length of the ice into the Rangers’ empty net with 12 seconds left in a 7-4 Senators win. The goal landed on rope hat giveaway night in Ottawa, when the first 7,000 fans through the door received a hat, and it tied Batherson with Dany Heatley and Marian Hossa for the most home hat tricks in Senators history, with three each.

A hat trick is supposed to be a finishing feat, three shots beaten past a goaltender. This one ended with a blocked shot, an empty net, and the full length of the ice doing the work. That is why it will be remembered longer than most hat tricks, and why the hats that had been handed out before the game came raining back down after it. Batherson did not shoot the puck into the net for his third goal. He got in front of someone else’s shot and let physics finish the job.

How did the third goal actually happen?

It started as a defensive play in Ottawa’s own zone. The Rangers were pressing late, goaltender Dylan Garand was on the bench for an extra attacker, and Adam Fox fired a point shot towards the Ottawa net. Batherson blocked it. The puck bounced, travelled the full length of the ice, and dribbled into the unguarded Rangers net with 12 seconds left, at 19:48 of the third period. Sportsnet’s clip of the play carried the same verdict as the building: a hat trick completed by blocking a shot from the other end of the ice. Batherson called it a weird one afterwards and said he would take it, which is the only sensible response to a goal that required no shot, no deke, and no goaltender to beat. The skill was in the block and the positioning. The net was empty, the ice was long, and the puck did what blocked pucks sometimes do when nobody is standing in the way.

What about the first two goals?

They were the conventional part of the night, and they matter because they show the third was not a fluke attached to an ordinary game. Batherson opened the scoring at 5:34 of the first period, beating Garand blocker side after a Jake Sanderson feed from the slot. He made it 3-0 early in the second when Dylan Cozens slid him a kick pass in front and he lifted it over Garand. He also assisted on Cozens’s goal later in the second, finishing the night with three goals and an assist. For readers who want the terminology straight, this site explains what a hat trick is in hockey and how an empty-net goal works. The first two goals were textbook finishing. The third was a reminder that hockey goals do not always arrive the way the textbook says they should.

Why did the giveaway make it better?

Because the building was already full of hats before Batherson scored his third. The Senators handed out rope hats to the first 7,000 fans through the door, Gino Hard reports, and the tradition of throwing hats for a hat trick did the rest. When the blocked shot found the empty net, the hats that had been giveaways became celebrations, thrown from the stands onto the ice in the final seconds of a game Ottawa had spent the third period trying not to lose. It is the kind of coincidence that cannot be planned: a hat trick on hat night, completed by the least likely method, in the last 12 seconds. The Senators’ own account of the night, in the Yandle podcast row that also featured Batherson, shows how much of Ottawa’s recent story has played out in front of its own fans, and Saturday gave those fans the happiest version of it.

How close did the Rangers come to spoiling it?

Very close, and that is what gives the blocked shot its weight. Ottawa led 3-0 early, then 4-1 after Cozens scored his first goal of the season, and the game looked comfortable. Then Will Cuylle scored short handed, J.T. Miller and Alexis Lafreniere added goals before the second intermission to make it 4-3, and Pavel Dorofeyev cut it to 5-4 with 4:28 left after Sanderson’s rebound goal had briefly restored breathing room. The third period, by Silver Seven Sens’ account, was a siege, with the Rangers pushing relentlessly and Zibanejad ringing one off the post soon after Dorofeyev’s goal. Michael Amadio’s empty-netter at 18:46 gave Ottawa a two-goal cushion, but the Rangers still had Garand pulled and Fox still had a point shot in him. If Batherson does not block that shot, the Rangers get one more look at a one-goal game with seconds left. Instead, the block ended the game, the comeback, and the debate about whether Ottawa could hold a lead.

Who else made the night work for Ottawa?

Jake Sanderson first, with a goal and two assists, including the feed for Batherson’s opener and his own rebound goal in the third, his first goal of the season. Then Jonas Johansson, who stopped 24 shots in his Senators debut after arriving from Tampa Bay in a September 25 trade, and who said afterwards that the game could have gone either way. That honesty fits a game Ottawa led by three, trailed in momentum for most of the third, and won by three anyway. The win moved Ottawa to 8-4-0 after Thursday’s 6-2 defeat to San Jose, and it came with a lineup already stretched thin: Gino Hard notes the Senators head out without Eklund, who is out 10 to 12 weeks after surgery. Garand, meanwhile, made 17 saves in a losing cause for the Rangers, who have now lost two straight and four of their past five, and who will look back at this game as the one where a blocked shot travelled the length of the ice and took two points with it.

What happens next?

Ottawa leaves on a five-game, 11-day road trip starting Tuesday at Vegas, with Johansson and Samuel Ersson expected to carry the goaltending while Linus Ullmark remains on injured reserve, ClutchPoints reports. The Rangers host the Kings on Monday, with Fox’s seven assists in his last three games the one attacking bright spot to carry into it. Batherson’s hat trick will not change either team’s season on its own. But it does something smaller and more lasting: it gives Ottawa a story its fans will tell back to each other, about the night the hats were free, the lead nearly vanished, and the third goal arrived without a shot. The Rangers’ goaltending picture, with Garand now carrying the load, makes that story sharper still, because the goal that completed the hat trick was scored against an empty net that only existed because New York had pulled its goaltender to chase the game. That is the whole night in one image: a team chasing, a player blocking, and a puck rolling home.