Pittsburgh native Logan Cooley scores hat trick as Mammoth beat Penguins in overtime

Logan Cooley, a Pittsburgh native playing for the Utah Mammoth, scored a hat trick against his hometown team on Thursday night, tying the score with one second left in regulation before Mikhail Sergachev won it for Utah 3:27 into overtime, 4-3, over the Pittsburgh Penguins at PPG Paints Arena.

The finish capped a game Pittsburgh had led twice in the final minute of the third period. Ben Kindel, playing his first game back after a medical episode, had put the Penguins ahead 3-2 with 25 seconds remaining, only for Cooley to bat a loose puck out of the air with his backhand for the tying goal with one second on the clock, according to the official NHL.com recap of the game.

A finish that belongs in the record book

Cooley opened the scoring 4:40 into the first period, intercepting a pass from Pittsburgh's Erik Karlsson and beating goaltender Arturs Silovs with a wrist shot from the high slot. He made it 2-0 at 14:11 of the first on a blocker-side shot from the net front. Karlsson pulled Pittsburgh within one in the second period, and Rickard Rakell tied it with a short-handed goal early in the third before Kindel's go-ahead goal set up the frantic finish. Cooley's third goal was his seventh of the season and the fourth hat trick of his NHL career; his previous one came in a 5-1 win over Vegas last November.

The sequence in the final half-minute of regulation was rare enough that NHL.com's recap noted it was only the 10th time in league history, regular season or playoffs, that teams had traded a go-ahead goal and a game-tying goal within the final 30 seconds of regulation, and the first time it had happened since April 2015. Sergachev settled matters in overtime, converting a rebound off a Barrett Hayton shot for his second goal of the season. Utah goaltender Sebastian Cossa made 31 saves as the Mammoth improved to 9-5-0; Silovs made 30 saves for a Pittsburgh team that fell to 5-6-2.

Pittsburgh's own

Cooley, 22, grew up in West Mifflin, a borough just southeast of downtown Pittsburgh, and learned to skate through the Little Penguins program that Sidney Crosby started to provide local children with free equipment. Arizona selected him third overall in the 2022 draft, the highest any player from his hometown has ever been picked, and he moved with the franchise when it relocated to Utah and was eventually renamed the Mammoth. The NHL's own account of an earlier homecoming game, from his rookie season, described him watching Penguins games as a child at PPG Paints Arena and dreaming of playing on that ice. He had gone six previous games against Pittsburgh without scoring before Thursday.

• Final: Utah Mammoth 4, Pittsburgh Penguins 3 (OT)
• Logan Cooley: hat trick, including the tying goal with one second left in regulation — his fourth career NHL hat trick
• Mikhail Sergachev scored the overtime winner at 3:27, off a rebound of a Barrett Hayton shot
• Sebastian Cossa made 31 saves for Utah; Arturs Silovs made 30 for Pittsburgh
• Utah defenseman Andrew Peeke played his 400th career NHL game; rookie Artem Duda made his NHL debut

A costly collapse for Pittsburgh

For the Penguins, the loss compounded a difficult stretch. Kindel's return and his third-period goal were a rare bright spot, and Evgeni Malkin, playing again after missing time with an illness, recorded two assists. But the two late Pittsburgh leads evaporated within seconds each time, and defenseman Kris Letang did not mince words afterward. "We battled hard to come back into it and get the lead," Letang said, "but I think, overall, the performance was not there." Malkin was similarly blunt, saying simply that the team needed to "play, like, so much harder, whole five guys," before practice the next day.

Utah coach Andre Tourigny was far more measured discussing his own team's night, and Cooley in particular.

"This city means so much to me. I'm super fortunate to be from here and to be able to grow up through the Penguins organization."

That was Cooley, reflecting afterward on facing the team he grew up rooting for. Tourigny called his center "really good" on the night, and Sergachev, who delivered the winning goal, credited his teammate without hesitation. "He's one of our top players who's supposed to be doing that," Sergachev said. "But I'm happy for him. He had a bit of a slow start, but he's going to show everyone what kind of player he is."

What's next

The win was part of a broader surge for a franchise still establishing itself in its new home. Utah's hockey team spent its first season after relocating from Arizona playing as the Utah Hockey Club before the Mammoth name became permanent in 2025, and the club reached the playoffs for the first time in its second Utah season. Thursday's comeback, against a Pittsburgh team built around Crosby, Malkin and Letang, offered another sign that the rebuild begun in the desert is paying off at altitude.

Utah does not play again until Sunday, when it visits the Philadelphia Flyers. Pittsburgh is back in action Saturday night at Montreal, looking to right itself after a defeat that, for a few seconds at least, seemed to belong to the home team and the hometown fans who came to see Cooley play. At 9-5-0, Utah now sits among the Western Conference's early leaders, while Pittsburgh's 5-6-2 record leaves it searching for consistency a quarter of the way into the season.