Utah Mammoth center Logan Cooley takes control of the puck during the first period of an NHL hockey game against the Vegas Golden Knights, Monday, Nov. 24, 2025, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Anna Fuder)
By Tom Walker
SALT LAKE CITY–Utah forward Logan Cooley scored four goals and assisted on another to exact revenge on the Golden Knights 5-1 from last week’s loss.
The Utah Mammoth (11-8-3) welcomed the Vegas Golden Knights (10-4-7) back to Delta Center on Monday night, just four days after Vegas defeated Utah 4-1 in Salt Lake City.
Dylan Guenther broke open the scoring at 14:54 of the first period with a top shelf blast for his ninth goal of the season, assisted by Logan Cooley and Nate Schmidt. Barely a minute later, Guenther returned the favor to Cooley, setting him up for his tenth goal of the season with the additional assist to Nate Schmidt to give the Mammoth a 2-0 lead heading into the locker room. Karel Vejmelka turned away all 8 Golden Knights shots in the frame.
At 5:24 of the second period, Vegas forward Ivan Barbashev cut the Utah lead in half with his eighth of the season, assisted by Jack Eichel, and Braeden Bowman. It would be the only goal allowed by Vejmelka on 15 shots in the period, while the Mammoth were unsuccessful in all three of their shot attempts.
Whereas Vegas seemed unstoppable last Thursday, Utah turned the tables completely on Monday, particularly in their dominant third period. Logan Cooley deflected a puck for an unassisted goal at 4:19 for his 11th of the season to put the Mammoth up 3-1.
Down by two goals with less than five minutes remaining, Vegas rolled the dice and pulled netminder Carl Lindbom early. The house won on the Golden Knights gamble as Cooley recorded the natural hat trick with goal #12 into the empty net as hats rained down on the Delta Center ice to give Utah a 4-1 lead. With a little more than three minutes to go in the third, Mammoth forward Kevin Stenlund went to the sin bin for holding against Cole Reinhardt.
Vegas head coach Bruce Cassidy rolled the dice one more time with nothing left to lose, pulling Lindbom again to go for broke with a 6-4 advantage in the offensive end. The strategy failed as Cooley netted his 4th of the night and 13th of the season into the empty net at 17:43 to seal the 5-1 victory with the shorthanded goal.
Logan’s run of goals resulted in the first four-goal game in Utah franchise history, and the first in the NHL this season. The last player aged 21 or younger to record four goals in a game was Patrik Laine who scored 5 for Winnipeg against St. Louis exactly seven years ago to the day.
Cooley joins Macklin Celebrini (San Jose) and Connor Bedard (Chicago) as the only players with two hat tricks so far this season, and the Mammoth join the Blackhawks as the only teams with three hat tricks so far on the year.
Cooley talked about his feat in the locker room after the game. “It’s awesome. Any time you do that, it’s special. Just to see how excited the guys were for me too, you get a cool feeling when you get the support of your teammates. I just think in general, we have such a tight group. Guys really care about each other and want everyone on the team to have success. So it’s awesome.” Talking about his mental process going into the game, Cooley said, “Yeah, I think it’s a long season. I think the big thing is consistency, and that’s something that for me, personally, I’m always trying to work on. … It wasn’t the easiest path to tonight, but I think just finding a way to stay with it. It’s a grind of a season, mentally, physically, but I think just leaning on guys that have experience, family, little things like that, get you out of it. And, I was fortunate to have kind of a big game tonight.” On the team’s improvement, he added, “I think just the way we kind of handled the lead too. I think that’s a big thing. I feel like in the past, we’ve been up and kind of get comfortable and teams start to bury us. I think the game against the Rangers and tonight, that’s how we know how to play. When we’re doing that, you see the results we get. For us, it’s about staying consistent with this process and not changing anything. There’s still stuff to clean up, but overall I was really happy about our performance the past two nights.”
Winning goaltender Goaltender Karel Vejmelka, who stopped 33 of 34 shots on the night, said, “Yeah, obviously, this one feels really good. It’s a big two points against a really good team, one of the best so far this season. So it feels really good.” Talking about how the team handles adversity, Vejmelka remarked, “Yeah, I think we are a really good team, and if we want to be successful, we need to find a way every night, and that’s part of being one of the best teams in the NHL. So we need to find a way every single night, no matter what, and we did it tonight. We showed up, and it feels really good.”
Utah Mammoth Head Coach André Tourigny said of Cooley, “He didn’t complicate his game. He didn’t try to get the play of the week. He will be on the play of the week because he scored four, but it was speed and space behind, and when he does that it’s special.” The second period has often been challenging for Utah this season, so it was particularly important to defend the lead. Tourigny commented, “Obviously in the second, they had a hell of a push. Like I said, they’re a good team. They’re a Stanley Cup contender for a reason. So we knew they would have a say in what will happen out there, but the intensity and the urgency we have in those situations and the way we protected that front, even if we’re not perfect and even if there’s a number of things we would like to get better at, I think the mindset is always the most important thing. I think the guys were really good with it. We were composed, we were intense, and we were even-keeled.” Last Thursday, Tourigny said that the team’s emotions got the best of them. Tonight was much different. “There was emotion and there was stress, you don’t want to lose the game, you don’t want to lose the lead, etc, etc. I think we did a pretty good job at staying composed. We did not do a perfect job. You could see the nerve, we didn’t make plays at the same pace, and we didn’t connect as much on our passes. So there’s stuff we can be better at, but that’s why there’s 82 games. We still have a lot of things to get better at, but the mindset of the guys was really good.”
Utah (12-8-3) wraps up the four-game homestand on Wednesday night against the Montreal Canadiens after which they will hit the road after Thanksgiving for six games away.
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