Columbus Blue Jackets' Johnny Gaudreau puts on a show with hat trick at NHL All-Star Game

Unlike Zach Werenski's trip to the NHL All-Star Game in Las Vegas last year, when he won his skills event and was part of a winning Metropolitan Division effort, the Blue Jackets did not have an All-Star winner this year.

But in his seventh All-Star appearance, Johnny Gaudreau still put on a show. His team from the Metro may have lost 10-6 to the Atlantic in the first game, but Gaudreau scored half of those goals — the seventh hat trick that has been scored in an All-Star Game since the three-on-three format was instituted in 2016.

"Playing with some really good players, finding me back-door wide open, so it's nice," Gaudreau told ESPN on the broadcast. "Hopefully (Sidney Crosby) and (Alex Ovechkin) can do something special here and win us this game."

Crosby and Ovechkin had a hand in the other three goals the Metro scored — Crosby scored two, both assisted by Ovechkin, and he picked up the secondary assist on Ovechkin's goal — but the Atlantic rode a hat trick from Gaudreau's former teammate in Calgary, Matthew Tkachuk, to victory. There was a sense that the Metro and Atlantic players were both trying harder than is typical for the All-Star game, perhaps driven by Tkachuk's desire to show off in front of his home fans in Sunrise, Florida.

All three of Gaudreau's goals were assisted by former Blue Jacket Artemi Panarin. If there are takeaways to be drawn from a three-on-three showcase played at half-speed, the combination of the two high-skill forwards will certainly get Blue Jackets fans thinking. For the first two goals, Panarin found Gaudreau on the back door twice 20 seconds apart, and the third goal was a breakaway that Panarin started from inside the defensive zone.

For the skills event, Gaudreau competed in what the NHL called the "Pitch ‘n Puck" challenge, which involved a par-4 hole on a local golf course and a combination of both hockey and golf shots. His drive, in which players shot a hockey puck onto a green, was respectable, but he was outdone by Montreal's Nick Suzuki when the competitors had to use their hockey sticks to putt a golf ball.

bjohnson@dispatch.com

@BaileyAJohnson_

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Blue Jackets' Johnny Gaudreau scores hat trick in NHL All-Star game