ST. PAUL, Minn. — No team in the National Hockey League has more points than the Utah Mammoth through the opening three weeks of the regular season.

Utah got its sixth win in a row, a 6-2 victory, over the Minnesota Wild on the road Saturday to tie the New Jersey Devils at the top of the league standings with 14 points. The Mammoth sit a point above the Colorado Avalanche in both the Western Conference and Central Division standings.

The spark, or really explosion, that started the action in Minnesota was, once again, Logan Cooley, playing in his college state. The 21-year-old rising superstar got his second consecutive multi-goal start after a natural hat trick Thursday in St. Louis, scoring two goals in the opening 3:29 at Grand Casino Arena in St. Paul.

“It feels like everything we pass him is going in,” line-mate JJ Peterka said of Cooley’s hot streak that has him tied for the NHL lead in goals with seven.

The opening goal was perhaps the most impressive of the season so far for Cooley, batting a lob from John Marino out of midair and through a sliver of space behind the goalie’s head to score.

Nick Schmaltz scored his sixth goal of the season 90 seconds later as Utah got out to another big lead, 3-0, on the road trip. The St. Louis Blues nearly came all the way back from a 4-0 deficit on Thursday, however, and the Wild achieved a similar feat with a goal late in the first period and the lone goal of the second to make it 3-2 heading into the final frame.

Goaltender Karel Vejmelka got the third-period shutout, enduring what head coach Andre Tourigny described as a “shooting gallery,” and the offense slammed the door shut over the final seven minutes of the game with goals from Schamltz, Peterka and Marino.

Vejmelka finished the night with a “rock solid” .943 save percentage, in the words of Tourigny, and his six wins are the most of any NHL netminder so far this season.

Schmaltz’s goal ties him with Cooley at the top of the NHL leaderboard, while Peterka’s goal was his first in five games and Marino’s was his first of the season, getting an empty-netter after Minnesota pulled its goalie in the final minute.

“They play really well on both sides of the puck and they don’t let success change the way they play,” Tourigny said of point-leaders Cooley and Schmaltz. “They have success and they sustain it.”

The question now is, just how long can they sustain it?

The six-game win streak is already the longest for the Utah/Arizona franchise since March 2019 and the longest active streak in the Western Conference by four games.

“We’ve got that swagger and just that winning feeling again,” Marino said. “And that’s something we want to keep going forward.”

Playing away from home hasn’t slowed the Mammoth down yet; and, if anything, the team continues to improve, getting two of its six-goal outings this season over the first two stops on the current trip. Perhaps the biggest test yet is less than 24 hours away, though, with Utah facing its first back-to-back Sunday in Winnipeg.

The team closes out its four-game road trip with a visit to Stanley Cup runner-up Edmonton on Tuesday, before a brief break and a single-game home stand on Sunday, Nov. 2 against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.