The Gordie Howe Hat Trick Tracker

A Gordie Howe Hat Trick — a goal, an assist, and a fight in one game — is hockey's quirkiest record. It's named for a man who, by every careful accounting, did it only two or three times in roughly 2,400 professional games. The stat isn't kept by the league. No trophy is awarded. It lives almost entirely in oral tradition, box scores, and the memories of beat reporters. And somehow it has become the defining shorthand for the kind of player hockey people love most: the one who does everything.

This page collects what can be verified. The all-time leaderboard below reflects documented career totals from public references. The detailed game table below that includes a curated sample of those games — more than 162 of them — with filters for player, season, and team. Dates flagged with “XX” mean we know the season and often the month, but the exact game day is not confirmed in public archives. We'd rather tell you that than make it up.

The All-Time Leaderboard

These are the career GHHT totals most commonly cited in public hockey-trivia references and the NHL Guide & Record Book appendix (which notes the feat without tracking it formally). Brendan Shanahan and Rick Tocchet trade the top spot depending on which source you consult; both 17 and 18 are defensible. The list below ranks every player with two or more documented GHHTs that we've been able to corroborate.

A few patterns jump off that leaderboard. Every player in the top ten was a power forward or a dual-threat enforcer — someone the coach trusted to kill a penalty, run a power play, and throw hands in the third period of a 2–2 road game. None of them were pure skill players. None of them were pure goons. The GHHT sits exactly on the seam between those two archetypes, which is why it fascinates hockey fans and frustrates anyone trying to build a modern roster. The skillsets it rewards have been steadily de-emphasized by every rule change since the second lockout.

Every Documented Howe Hat Trick

The table below is sortable (click any column header) and filterable. Dates shown as a month or year only carry an “XX” placeholder in the underlying data — the season and often the month are verified, but the exact game day is not.

The Story Behind the Name

The delicious irony of the Gordie Howe Hat Trick is that Gordie Howe barely ever had one. Two games are universally credited to him. A third, loosely tied to the famous 1959 Lou Fontinato bout at Madison Square Garden, is disputed by historians who have gone back to the box score and can't line up the goal, assist, and fighting major cleanly. That's it. Two, maybe three, in a 26-year NHL career plus seven more seasons in the WHA. Fewer GHHTs than Cam Neely had in a single injury-shortened decade with the Bruins.

So why is the stat named after him? Because Howe was the archetype, not the statistical leader. When you're trying to describe the complete hockey player — someone who could score 50, pass for 50 more, and rearrange your face if you took liberties with a teammate — you reach for Howe because everyone already knows what Howe was. Naming the stat after Shanahan or Tocchet or Sutter would be technically more accurate and emotionally wrong. Howe is the stat. The feat is him even when the ledger belongs to someone else.

The name itself seems to have emerged in the late 1970s or early 1980s, most likely in Detroit sports-talk circles and then via national broadcasters once NHL cable coverage expanded in the mid-80s. It was never coined in a single article or press conference. There's no moment you can point to. It just became the language. Harry Neale, who coached Howe during his final WHA season with the New England Whalers and later called NHL games on Hockey Night in Canada, is often credited as one of the phrase's early popularizers. Neale himself has been careful in interviews to say he doesn't know who said it first.

The other wrinkle is that Howe himself — by most accounts — didn't particularly love the nickname. He thought of himself as a scorer. He scored 801 regular-season NHL goals and 975 when you add the WHA. The fighting reputation, he felt, was somewhat overplayed by a league that needed a mythology and found one in the elbows and the Fontinato story. He was, his son Mark Howe has said, more interested in being remembered for a record book that nobody else could touch than a statistical curiosity named for elbows and scars. But the phrase stuck, and now it's how the average North American hockey fan understands what a complete player looks like.

The stat also embodies a minor honesty test for the sport. To earn a Howe Hat Trick you have to be skilled enough to score and set up, and willing enough to drop the gloves when the circumstances demand it. Purely offensive players rarely qualify. Purely physical players almost never qualify. The Venn diagram overlap is small and it produces exactly the kind of player — Clark Gillies, Cam Neely, Rick Tocchet, Brendan Shanahan, Keith Tkachuk — that the hockey culture tends to canonize. It's an unofficial stat that perfectly reflects official values.

The Natural Howe Hat Trick

If the regular GHHT is rare, the natural variant is practically mythological. A natural Howe Hat Trick requires the three components to happen in chronological order in a single game: goal first, then assist, then fight. The idea borrows from the natural hat trick in soccer and hockey (three consecutive goals) and has largely been codified online by enthusiasts rather than by the league.

Estimates from public-facing compilations put the all-time count around a dozen. That number is soft. Some researchers require the three events to happen in three consecutive periods (goal in the first, assist in the second, fight in the third); others accept any chronological ordering within the same game. Under the looser definition, a handful of players have multiple natural GHHTs to their name. Under the stricter one, you're looking at a list that could probably fit on an index card.

Shanahan is believed to have several. Tocchet as well. Cam Neely's November 1988 game against the Rangers is sometimes cited as a natural (goal in the first, assist in the second, fight in the third) though period-by-period records from 1988 are not always reliable. Brian Sutter's 1985 game against the Oilers has a similar claim. What you can say with confidence is that the natural GHHT will probably never be a formally tracked stat, because the data required to track it reliably — exact period and timing for every fighting major in every game — only exists at fidelity for the last 30-odd seasons.

That data gap matters. We can say confidently that Bob Probert had a GHHT in 1988 because the Detroit Free Press wrote about it and Hockey-Reference preserves the game log. We cannot say as confidently whether his goal came before or after his fight without pulling the play-by-play sheet, and for games before 1998 the play-by-play sheets don't always exist in digital form. Anyone claiming a precise count of natural Howe Hat Tricks is either overstating their confidence or restricting their analysis to the modern era.

Modern-Era Howe Hat Tricks (2010–present)

Modern GHHTs are notable mostly because they're disappearing. The NHL has averaged roughly 180–220 fighting majors per season across the last three campaigns, down from 800+ in 2008–09 and from well over a thousand in the peak-90s. When fights become rare, GHHTs become rare by the same multiplier, because the fight is the gating event. You can score and assist more than once per game fairly easily. Getting a fighting major requires a specific set of circumstances that modern rules — and modern roster construction — actively discourage.

The 56 modern-era entries below reflect that compression. The 2010s still produced regular GHHTs because players like Milan Lucic, Wayne Simmonds, Matthew Tkachuk, Tom Wilson, and Corey Perry were willing to drop gloves at meaningful moments. The 2020s have produced fewer. The 2023–24 and 2024–25 seasons have each had a handful of credible candidates and almost nothing else. If the current trend continues — and there is no reason to think it won't — the GHHT will become one of hockey's rarest statistical events, not because players have gotten less skilled but because the third leg of the stool has been legislated away.

There's an argument that the decline of the GHHT is a leading indicator of a broader cultural change in the sport, and that the NHL's deliberate de-emphasis of fighting — through the instigator rule, the elimination of the designated enforcer role, stricter supplemental discipline, and the concussion-risk conversation — has succeeded in changing who plays in the league. The modern fourth-liner is a penalty-killing forechecker who occasionally forechecks hard. The modern power forward is built like Matthew Tkachuk, not like Cam Neely. There is less room for the archetype the GHHT rewards. That's a deliberate choice, and in most respects a sensible one. But it does mean that a hundred years from now, the kid looking up “Gordie Howe Hat Trick” in whatever research tool replaces Wikipedia will find a curious, mostly-closed chapter of hockey history rather than an active statistical category.

Gordie Howe's Own Howe Hat Tricks

Here is the complete list of GHHTs reliably credited to Howe himself. Two are widely accepted. A third is disputed. One additional candidate from his WHA years with Houston is plausible but essentially unverifiable because the WHA's record-keeping was patchy.

The numbers are almost embarrassing for a player whose name is now synonymous with the feat. In 1,767 NHL regular-season games plus 419 WHA regular-season games plus 235 combined playoff games — nearly 2,500 professional appearances — Howe managed two confirmed GHHTs and maybe a third. For comparison, Rick Tocchet recorded 18 in roughly half the games. Brian Sutter had 9 in 779 NHL games.

Why? The most common explanation, and the one Howe himself leaned into when asked, is that after the 1959 Fontinato fight at Madison Square Garden, nobody in the NHL wanted to drop the gloves with him. That bout became folklore within a week. The photos of Fontinato's broken nose and wrecked face ran in every sports page on the continent. Howe was 31 years old. He would play another 20 seasons professionally. The message had been sent, and after 1959 the opportunities simply stopped presenting themselves. You can only get a fighting major if someone is willing to fight you, and by 1960 that number was approaching zero.

There's a secondary explanation too. Howe played in an era when fighting majors were called more sparingly than they would be from the 1970s onward. A full-scale brawl in a 1955 NHL game often produced minor penalties rather than five-minute majors. Howe's preferred method of retaliation — a well-placed elbow delivered at a moment nobody was quite looking — rarely drew five. It was effective and nearly invisible. It also didn't qualify for the stat that bears his name.

The lesson of Howe's own GHHT count is probably that the stat was always destined to be named after him and owned by someone else. The ideal GHHT player is a man who can and will fight regularly. Howe could. He just didn't have to.

Methodology and Known Gaps

A few notes on how this dataset was assembled and what it doesn't claim to be.

Reliable coverage window. Modern fighting-major data from Hockey-Reference covers roughly 1988 to present. Before 1988, fighting records exist but are less systematic. Pre-Original-Six fighting data is essentially editorial rather than statistical — we know who the tough guys were because contemporary newspaper writers said so, not because someone kept a spreadsheet.

What a fight is. For purposes of this tracker, a GHHT requires a five-minute fighting major. A roughing minor, a cross-check that draws two minutes, or an instigator-without-major does not qualify. This aligns with the consensus definition used by public hockey-trivia references, but a handful of compilations define fighting more loosely and would therefore show higher totals for aggressive players.

Playoff GHHTs. The conventional definition counts playoff games. Pat Maroon's 2021 playoff entry in this table reflects that. Some compilations restrict the stat to regular-season games, which reduces totals for players like Claude Lemieux and Maroon.

The WHA question. Gordie Howe's plausible WHA-era GHHT with Houston is included with an explicit note. WHA fighting-major records from the 1973–79 window are incomplete. Multiple compilations include Howe's WHA years in his total and some stop at his NHL career. We've included the WHA entry with a clear flag.

Known omissions. Any curated list of 100-ish games drawn from roughly 130 career GHHTs (Shanahan 17 + Tocchet 18 + Sutter 9 + all the others) will miss specific games. The leaderboard totals above are the aggregate figures from public sources; the per-game table is a representative sample, not an exhaustive ledger. If you have a specific date for a listed XX placeholder — especially for pre-1988 games where we're working from secondary sources — we'd love to tighten the data.

Related Reading

• The Gordie Howe Hat Trick: Hockey's Toughest Feat — the origin of the feat, explained.
• Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey — the career behind the namesake.
• Harry Neale on Mr. Howe — stories from the coach who saw Howe's last professional seasons up close.
• Bob Probert — 29 goals, 398 PIM, one iconic GHHT.
• The Greatest Hockey Fights — the fight-by-fight context for the third leg of the stool.
• The Greatest NHL Rivalries — most GHHTs happen in rivalry games, and the list proves it.
• What Happened to NHL Enforcers — the rule changes, the roster changes, and why the GHHT is disappearing.