In Seattle, the Minnesota Wild’s Rem Pitlick hit for his first three goals in the NHL, a natural hat trick, in a 4-2 win over the Kraken on Saturday night.
“I’m super grateful, it’s been a whirlwind just coming to Minnesota and scoring my first and then getting three like that’s it’s really special,” Pitlick said. “It’s a big wild super dream and [Ryan Hartman] assists on all three of them. Just the plays that he made, I think the last two he intercepted both of those pucks. ‘Wow’, that’s all I can say.”
Cam Talbot made 28 saves in the Wild win.
“[Hartman’s] another guy you can’t say enough about,” Talbot said. “Does it for us all offensively, wins face-offs in the D zone, killing penalties. He’s kind of a Swiss Army knife, you can put them out in any situation and you’re comfortable with him out there. So another guy that’s done a lot for us so far.”
Minnesota improved to 10-4-0, the best 14-game start in franchise history.
“Stressing to make sure we just continue to play every shift for 60 minutes,” Hartman said. “I don’t think we played the full 60, we gave up a couple chances. Maybe a few minutes there. We were there in our own end but overall it is a good team win.”
Alex Wennberg and Marcus Johansson (power play)were the Seattle strikers.
“You’re not going to come out against this team and generate a ton of offense,” Seattle head coach Dave Hakstol said. “The key there is also not giving up a ton of offense and we didn’t give up very much. But what we did, the breakaways in the in the second period, are plays that are too easy to give up to that opposition.”
The Kraken dropped to 4-10-1.
“We had a good push at the start of the third,” Hakstol said. “We had at least five good chances probably in the first three or four minutes of the period. It tightened up from there, but we had real good chances to start the third period, couldn’t get one of those to go.”
Nico Sturm added an empty-net goal in the 15th minute of the third period to make the score 4-1.
Philipp Grubauer made 18 saves in the Kraken loss.
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