What Is a Hat Trick in Hockey? Rules & Types

A hat trick in hockey is when a single player scores three goals in one game. When it happens on home ice, fans celebrate by throwing their hats onto the rink, creating a small blizzard of caps that play has to stop for while the crew clears the ice.

That hat shower is the part everyone recognizes, but the term itself is older than the tradition and older than hockey. Below is where the name came from, the different types of hat trick, and just how rare three goals in a game really is.

Where the term comes from

The phrase started in cricket, not hockey. According to the NHL, English bowler H. H. Stephenson took three wickets on three consecutive deliveries in an 1858 match, and spectators passed a collection to buy him a commemorative hat. From there, “hat trick” spread across sports as shorthand for three of something by one person.

Hockey adopted the word for three goals, and the hat-throwing custom followed later. As NPR and the NHL both recount, Canadian haberdashers in the 1940s promoted their shops by handing a free hat to any player who scored three goals in a game. The gimmick stuck, fans started bringing their own hats to toss, and a marketing idea turned into one of the sport’s most durable rituals.

The types of hat trick

Not every three-goal night is described the same way. A few named variations carry real meaning among fans and broadcasters.

Type	What it means
Hat trick	Three goals by one player in a single game
Natural hat trick	Three goals in a row by the same player, with no other goals by either team in between
Double hat trick	Six goals by one player in a game (informal, not an official NHL term)
Gordie Howe hat trick	A goal, an assist, and a fight all in one game

The natural hat trick is the purest version. Because the player scores three straight without anyone else finding the net in between, it signals total dominance over a stretch of the game rather than three goals spread across three periods.

The Gordie Howe hat trick is the fan favorite for a different reason. Named for the Detroit Red Wings legend famous for both scoring and toughness, it rewards an all-around game: put the puck in the net, set up a teammate, and drop the gloves once. It is arguably harder to complete than a regular hat trick, since fights are far less common in the modern game.

Why fans throw hats

The hat toss is a spontaneous tribute, not a rule. Once the third goal goes in, home fans launch their caps over the glass, and the game pauses while arena staff sweep the ice clear. It is one of the few moments where a stoppage in play is a cause for celebration rather than frustration.

Players often keep a memorable hat, and clubs sometimes collect the caps and donate them to charity. Visiting players get the same shower far less often, since the ritual is powered by the home crowd, but a truly special performance can draw hats from opposing fans too.

If you follow the sport across leagues, it is worth knowing the term travels. Soccer uses it the same way for three goals, which we cover in what a hat trick means in football, and the shared vocabulary is a nice reminder of how one cricket anecdote shaped the language of several sports.

How rare is a hat trick?

Rare enough that it remains a genuine highlight. Across a full NHL season of well over a thousand games, only a small share end with any player recording a hat trick, and the majority of players never score one in their entire careers.

The best goal scorers can post several in a strong season, and the all-time hat-trick leaders sit far ahead of the pack, but even for them a three-goal night is an event rather than a routine. That scarcity is exactly why the hat shower still means something. When the caps come flying, the crowd knows it just watched one of hockey’s signature individual achievements.

Hat tricks in the record book

Over a long career, hat tricks become a marker of the game’s elite finishers. The players who pile them up are almost always the same names that top the all-time goal-scoring lists, since consistently scoring three in a game requires elite finishing over many seasons. As ESPN’s tracking of career hat tricks shows, Wayne Gretzky sits atop the list, a fitting place for the NHL’s all-time leading scorer.

What makes the achievement stand out is how it concentrates production into a single night. A player can have a strong scoring season spread evenly across games, but a hat trick means three of those goals landed in one outing. That is why even for prolific scorers, a multi-hat-trick season is a genuine highlight, and why fans track the feat so closely. A hat trick in a playoff game or a rivalry matchup carries even more weight, cementing performances that fans remember for years.

The short version

A hat trick is three goals by one player in a game, and fans mark it by throwing hats onto the ice. A natural hat trick means three straight goals with nothing in between, a Gordie Howe hat trick pairs a goal and an assist with a fight, and a double hat trick is the informal name for six goals in a game. The word itself is a cricket import that hockey made its own. For more of the sport’s winter-ice culture, see our explainers on what the hammer is in curling and how much a curling stone weighs.