Wild and Canucks Combine for 17 Goals in the Craziest Game of the NHL Season
The Minnesota Wild and the Vancouver Canucks played what is undoubtedly going to hold the title of the most insane game of the 2023-24 season. The game started well for Vancouver as they jumped out to a 2-0 lead midway through the first period. Wild center Joel Eriksson Ek responded at the end of the period with one of his eventual three goals in the contest to cut the Canucks lead in half at the end of one period. However, the Canucks came right back out in the second period with two more goals in the first 10 minutes to make it a 4-1 Canucks lead. The teams would go on to trade goals at the back end of the period before Mats Zuccarello scored for the Wild with 33 seconds left in the period. The Canucks went into the locker room after the second period up 5-3.
While the first two periods’ eight combined goals were an unusually high goal total for an NHL game, all the craziness occurred in the third period. The Wild scored five goals in the first five minutes of the third period. Yes, you read that right, and it is not a typo. The period started with the Canucks up 5-3, as previously mentioned, and with 14:48 left in the third period, the Wild were all of a sudden up 8-5. Including Zuccarello’s goal in the waning seconds of the second period, the Wild tallied six goals in 5:45 of game time. That is the fourth-fastest time to record that number of goals in the history of the NHL, which was established in 1917. Here is a quick breakdown of what went down in those first five minutes of the third period: Joel Eriksson Ek scored his second and third goals of the game over the first minute and 44 seconds of the frame. Meanwhile, star forward Kirill Kaprizov tallied a goal of his own between Eriksson Ek’s two goals, and then the Wild went on a dry spell by not scoring for the next three minutes of game time before Marco Rossi scored. Then Kaprizov scored again less than 30 seconds after Rossi.
Despite all that craziness, the Canucks, to their credit, showed resilience. They fought back with two straight goals by Nikita Zadorov and Brock Boeser to cut the Minnesota lead down to 8-7 with just over two minutes left. However, the Wild were able to hold on as they netted two empty net goals, one by Jonas Brodin and the other by Kirill Kaprizov, which gave him a hat trick on the night. To wrap this up, here are some crazy numbers from the game that help put into perspective how crazy this game was. 10: This is the number of goals by the Wild. The double-digit goal total set a new franchise record for goals in a single game. 7: Seven is the number of goals the Wild scored in the third period. No team has scored more goals in one period since 1999. 3: This is the number of players who scored a hat trick in the game. Kirill Kaprizov and Joel Eriksson Ek for the Wild and J.T. Miller for the Canucks all scored three goals in the contest. This was the first game to have three different players accomplish a hat trick in the same game since 1992.
