As he wandered the Delta Center concourse during the first home game in Utah Hockey Club history, a preseason tilt with the Los Angeles Kings, Ryan Smith got a kick out of all the jerseys he saw. New jerseys, old jerseys, retro jerseys, specialty jerseys, autographed jerseys — jerseys from all around the league.
He didn’t see any Utah Hockey Club jerseys, though. The blue-on-blue sweaters with a diagonal UTAH across the chest won’t even be available to purchase until next month, most likely.
“People were coming up and saying thank you,” said Smith, owner of Utah Hockey Club and the Utah Jazz. “The reason they were saying thank you is those are the only jerseys they have. Other teams. Now they’ll have their own. It’s like, they want this.”
A frantic six months which saw the end (for now) of the Arizona Coyotes and the creation of the Utah Hockey Club culminates in Tuesday’s season opener against the Chicago Blackhawks. For those who unplugged completely over the offseason or for casual sports fans unfamiliar with the long and sordid history of the Coyotes, here’s a quick explainer of how and why we got here.
So… is this an expansion team?
Not exactly. Certainly not in the traditional sense, the way the Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken were. Smith didn’t pay an expansion fee to the league. Instead, he purchased all the Arizona Coyotes assets — the players, essentially — for $1.2 billion in April. To avoid an inevitable protracted legal battle, the league allowed then-Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo to retain the name and history of the Coyotes and gave him five years to build a new arena so he could resurrect the franchise. Meruelo has already given up on that dream, but the Coyotes still are likely to return in some fashion in the not-too-distant future. It’s too big a market for the NHL to abandon completely. So while the Coyotes retained the history of the Winnipeg Jets when they moved from Winnipeg to Phoenix in 1996, the Utah Hockey Club does not retain the history of the Coyotes. It’s a clean slate, as if all the players were simply traded to this new team.
(If you really want your brain to melt, consider that the Winnipeg Jets returned to the NHL in 2011 when they moved from Atlanta, and their history includes the Atlanta Thrashers, but not the old Winnipeg Jets. It’s hockey, just roll with it.)
Why did they leave Arizona?
There might not be enough bandwidth on the internet to adequately explain this. That the league happily moved a team from a metro area with nearly 5 million people to one with a little over 1 million should tell you how bad things had been in the Valley.
Here’s a laughably short recap: The Coyotes played in downtown Phoenix’s America West Arena from 1996 to 2003 before moving out west to their own arena in Glendale, which became Gila River Arena. The arena and its surrounding area were excellent. The location was not. Nearly all of the players lived in the Scottsdale area, on the complete other side of Phoenix. Most of the fans lived in Scottsdale, Phoenix or Tempe. Glendale wasn’t close to any of those places, and traffic made getting to the arena a chore for fans and players alike. That, combined with 12 straight years of missing the playoffs, obviously hurt attendance.
After years of poor ownership, mismanagement and clashes with local government, the city of Glendale kicked the Coyotes out of Gila River Arena in August of 2021, opting out of their joint lease agreement. The city even threatened to lock the team out of the arena because of a stack of unpaid bills and a delinquent $1.3 million tax bill.
So the Coyotes fled to Arizona State’s Mullett Arena to start the 2022-23 season. The beautiful but tiny (4,600 capacity) college rink was an undeniable embarrassment for the league, and the pressure was on Meruelo to find a new arena in the Tempe area. He thought he found the right spot, but the residents of Tempe shockingly voted down the proposed arena and entertainment center in May of 2023, leaving the Coyotes in the lurch. Smith had been angling for an expansion team in Salt Lake City, and the league essentially pulled the plug on Arizona (for now), pressuring Meruelo to sell rather than allow the Coyotes to spend several more seasons at Arizona State.
Why doesn’t the team have a name?
The decision to send the Coyotes to Salt Lake City was incredibly sudden, coming just days after the regular season ended in April. Team branding is a huge part of the sports business, and Utah didn’t want to rush it (plus all those people who buy Utah Hockey Club jerseys will inevitably buy the new ones next year, too). Smith has been very public with the process, allowing fans to vote on a bunch of proposed names. The list had been whittled down to six over the summer:
• The Utah Blizzard, which continues the double-Z theme of the NBA’s Jazz and the old minor-league baseball team, the Salt Lake Buzz.
• The Utah Hockey Club, which is the temporary name.
• The Utah Mammoth, a nod to the massive creatures that once roamed Utah.
• The Utah Outlaws, which brings the Old West feel.
• The Utah Venom, which just, uh, sounds cool, we guess?
• The Utah Yeti(s), which just about everyone is expecting to win. It’s just a matter of whether it will be singular or plural.
Where will they play?
The good news is there was a professional-caliber arena already in Salt Lake: the Delta Center, home of the Jazz. The bad news is, just like America West Arena in Phoenix, it wasn’t built for hockey. There are only 11,000 unobstructed seats, with up to 5,000 more that Utah will sell at a discount as “single-goal view” tickets. It’s a lot like the New York Islanders’ failed experiment in Brooklyn at Barclays Center, only Smith is working to address the issue. It could take a few years, but Delta Center has room to grow and plans are in place to increase capacity and ensure more unobstructed views.
“It’ll be in the range of what a team needs for good NHL capacity,” said Jim Olson, the Jazz president who’s been spearheading the massive renovations at the Delta Center to accommodate the new hockey team.
There are other concerns as the Delta Center goes from a basketball-only arena to a multi-purpose arena. Simply scheduling the season was a challenge, as both the NHL and NBA schedules were mostly put together by the time UHC was willed into existence. Concerts were on the calendar, too. From Jan. 29 through Feb. 5, for example, UHC and the Jazz alternate home games every day. That’s become child’s play for established multi-purpose arenas such as New York’s Madison Square Garden, Chicago’s United Center and Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, but it’ll all be new for the Utah crew.
“These things might look simple, but they’ve been incredibly challenging,” Smith said. “We’ll make it work, though. … I’m a big believer that innovation happens that way — compelling events are a big thing in our lives.”
Are there hockey fans in Utah?
Of course! By June, the team said it had secured 34,000 season ticket deposits. It won’t hurt that UHC should be better than your average expansion team, as the Coyotes and general manager Bill Armstrong (who remains the team’s GM) were deep into a rebuild that had stocked the roster with a lot of exciting young talent such as Logan Cooley and Dylan Guenther. After acquiring defensemen Mikhail Sergachev and John Marino in draft-weekend trades, Utah could conceivably contend for a playoff spot this season. Given the impact the Golden Knights’ stunning run to the Stanley Cup Final had in their first year, it’s evident success on the ice can lead to success off the ice.
And for those who are only hockey-curious, UHC is working to introduce them to the sport. Broadcaster and former Coyotes winger Tyson Nash is doing a “Manningcast”-like series of online videos breaking down the rules, intricacies and traditions of hockey.
It’s been a wild six months for Smith and his team, and it’s all led up to Tuesday night.
“I truly believe this is a community asset, and it’s something for everyone,” Smith said. “I enjoy it when others are enjoying it. It’s exciting, man.”
(Photo: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)
