SALT LAKE CITY — Just call him Captain Clutch.

Clayton Keller had a goal and an assist, including a fastbreak game-winner 13 seconds into overtime, to help the Utah Mammoth secure a 4-3 win over the Winnipeg Jets on Sunday evening at the Delta Center.

After giving up a 3-0 lead, with Winnipeg’s late two-goal rally in the third, Dylan Guenther found Keller to open the extra period with a sharpshooting slapshot that gave the Mammoth its fourth win in six games.

JJ Peterka, Lawson Crouse and Alexander Kerfoot added a goal for the Mammoth (18-17-3, 38 points) to secure their fourth win in the past six games. Karel Vejmelka made 22 saves in goal for Utah.

But Kyle Connor scored two twice to rally the Jets (15-18-2, 35 points) and force overtime, setting up Keller’s heroics.

The 27-year-old captain took a cross feed from Guenther to bury the right wing’s 11th goal of the season for Utah’s fifth overtime winner — all provided by the dynamic duo.

“Me and Gunner chatted before overtime started, and he said, ‘Let’s come with a lot of speed,'” said Keller, who had his team-high 10th multi-point game of the season. “I think that was something in my head as we came onto the ice and he won the draw. He demanded it right away from Sergie, and made an unbelievable play in the neutral zone.

“He slid it over to me, and I had a lot of time and space to get the shot off. It was good to see it go in, for sure.”

Crouse opened the scoring early for the Mammoth, finishing off a counter by Guenther with his ninth goal of the season to put the hosts up 1-0 six minutes into the game.

Keller found Peterka from out wide for a tip-in to double the advantage in the opening period, and Kerfoot sniped his first goal of the season off a feed from Sean Durzi just three minutes into the second to stretch the Mammoth’s lead to 3-0.

It was the first goal for Kerfott since March, after returning from an abdominal injury prior to Friday’s 2-1 loss at New Jersey. The 31-year-old center scored 11 goals in 81 games of Utah’s inaugural season in 2024-25.

“It’s awesome to get him back,” Keller said of the center known as Kerf. “We’ve definitely had more juice since he’s been back.”

Utah was cruising and confident — for good reason. The Mammoth were 10-1-1 while leading after the second period, compared to the Jets’ 1-13-0 with a two-goal deficit after two periods.

But the visitors weren’t out.

“I would’ve loved to close the game right there,” said Utah coach Andre Tourigny. “I think we got a little bit nervous, and we lost our composure with the puck.

“There are two things that are important when you have the lead, and one is having poise with the puck,” he added. “That doesn’t mean to be slow; it’s to be fast, to keep moving your feet, move the puck, and have a lot of pace defensively. … Then we became a little bit too conservative, and they were able to come back.”

Connor pulled one back for Winnipeg off the power play, a slapshot midway through the second period that cut the deficit to 3-1. The 29-year-old left wing from Michigan lit the lamp from the corner to cut the deficit to 3-2 with 4:35 remaining.

That set up Morgan Barron, who equalized less than 20 seconds later to force overtime.

“The third there was obviously not great. It’s something we have to learn from,” Keller said. “You’ve still got to make plays, even if we’re winning. We know they’re going to make a push.

“You’d rather mess up trying to do the right thing than just be safe and see what happens,” he added. “I think that’s something we’ve got to learn from, and we will moving forward.”

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.