(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Merchandise is available for sale during a preseason game for the Utah Mammoth at Delta Center in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025.
Less than 16 months into their existence, the Utah Mammoth have checked the sort of boxes that make older, less fortunate fan bases seethe.
They’ve got a core of young, talented players. They’ve got an owner with obvious passion and a long-term plan. Down the road, there will be a rebuilt, reimagined Delta Center that hosts Olympic hockey and reshapes downtown Salt Lake City.
What the franchise does not have, at least not for the time being, is a team nickname unencumbered by legal red tape.
On Sept. 25, Mammoth Hockey LLC, a Portland, Ore.,-based company producing equipment bags under the Mammoth Hockey name since 2014, filed a counterclaim seeking an injunction against the NHL team in U.S. District Court in Utah. The counterclaim is in response to an initial federal lawsuit filed on July 1 by the Utah Mammoth, who are owned by 47-year-old billionaire businessman Ryan Smith, that seeks to end the trademark dispute.
The Utah Mammoth did not respond to The Athletic’s request for comment on Mammoth Hockey’s counterclaim. After filing suit in July, the team released a statement saying in part that it and the NHL “believe strongly that we have the right to use the name Utah Mammoth under federal and state law, and that our use will not harm the defendant or its business in any way.”
It’s the latest chapter in the hockey team’s ongoing, somewhat circuitous attempt to establish a permanent brand identity. Here’s the latest on where the legal proceedings stand.
For more than 11 years, Mammoth Hockey has manufactured and sold hockey equipment bags “designed to survive years of intense use under extreme conditions,” according to legal filings reviewed by The Athletic. “(They) are made of heavy-duty resilient materials including 18-ounce truck tarp, pack cloth silver lining, seatbelt shoulder straps, and brass zippers with red paracord pulls.”
(Mammoth Hockey) The equipment bag, with Mammoth logo, that the company makes.
All that, of course, means that Mammoth’s products cost a fair bit more than standard equipment bags, ranging in price from $189 to $275 on their website. Co-founders Erik Olson and Lars Huschke chose the name “because it signifies strength, endurance and resilience due to the Ice Age animal’s size and ability to survive harsh conditions,” Olson stated in the legal filings.
The company used the crowd-sourcing platform Kickstarter to raise money for its initial design in 2014 and registered as a limited liability company in Oregon in 2017. According to the filings, they’ve sold their products to customers in 47 states and sponsored various youth hockey teams in the Pacific Northwest, and they reported more than 540,000 views of their Facebook page from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 2, 2025.
In June 2024, Olson — along with the rest of the world — learned that the then-Utah Hockey Club had chosen “Mammoth” as one of six finalists for its permanent nickname. Shortly after, he posted to the company’s official Facebook account that “(we’re) pretty partial” to Mammoth.
In April 2025, after the NHL team was forced to move on from its original nickname choice of “Yetis,” Olson sent a LinkedIn message to Rachel Moffitt, assistant to the team’s president of hockey operations, Chris Armstrong, saying that “it would be cool to talk about a possible collaboration” if Mammoth wound up as the final name.
Moffitt responded — as noted in messages below obtained in court records — that she’d spoken to Armstrong, that they hadn’t finalized the nickname decision and that they would “definitely keep this partnership in mind should things end up moving in that direction.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Mammoth goaltender Vitek Vanecek (41) blocks a shot assisted by Utah Mammoth defenseman Mikhail Sergachev (98) during a preseason game for The Utah Mammoth at Delta Center in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025.
Thirteen days later, Mammoth was announced as the choice. The team also unveiled logos, uniforms and a limited selection of merchandise.
In June 2025, Olson, via his attorney, sent a cease-and-desist letter. The team responded with a letter noting Olson’s perceived support for the selection via the aforementioned social media messages. In subsequent communication, Mammoth Hockey said that these comments “mischaracterized” Olson’s intent, and that “the likelihood of confusion (between the two brands) will have a detrimental effect” on his business.
The team soon after filed its federal suit against Mammoth Hockey, characterizing the company’s second letter as a “threat” that had left the organization with “the proverbial Sword of Damocles over their heads.”
As it has since July 1, the team wants a judicial declaration that its use of the “Utah Mammoth” trademark is legal and doesn’t violate any trademark rights possessed by Mammoth Hockey LLC. According to the team’s argument, the brands’ logos look too different to be confused and that it’s “unlikely consumers would expect any relationship between the parties to exist.” The team also noted that Mammoth Hockey has never filed a federal trademark application for the “Mammoth” designation, meaning that Mammoth Hockey’s rights would be based on common law and thus apply on a geographically limited level.
Mammoth Hockey, meanwhile, seeks to prevent the hockey team from marketing and selling goods in the 47 states where it’s done business — including Utah. The company’s argument is that Mammoth Hockey possesses protectable trademark rights through its “first and continued commercial use” in those 47 states, and that the logos are “confusingly similar” enough to cause harm.
In filings, Mammoth Hockey also argued that the Utah Mammoth has saturated the market with their own gear, causing consumers to “mistakenly believe Defendant’s goods, including its highly durable hockey bags, are associated with Plaintiffs’ hockey team and hockey-related goods, including their cheaply made hockey bags.”
When asked by The Athletic on Thursday whether he wished to comment further on the issue, Olson declined with, “Everything we want to say is in the legal filings and press release.”
The team was forced to move on from initial preference, the Utah Yetis, after it was refused by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over potential confusion with the existing YETI cooler brand. Attempts to broker a deal with YETI were unsuccessful, so the team moved on to Plan B, announcing a fan vote in late Jan. 2025 between “Mammoth,” “Wasatch” and “Utah Hockey Club.”
The team had to move quickly in order finalize a name and logo for the 2025-26 season and, according to Mammoth Hockey’s legal filings, re-opened the search without knowing whether “Mammoth” was an existing trademark under common law. “Yeti,” for comparison, is federally registered.
The team, according to Mammoth Hockey’s filing, never contacted the company or attempted to negotiate, as they did with YETI coolers. Instead, the filing stated, the team “hid their intentions to use the Mark and Logo from (Mammoth Hockey) because they had already decided to take them in time for the NHL season.”
That has to be viewed as highly unlikely. The Mammoth — set to play their first regular-season game with their new name and branding on Oct. 9 — simply have too much at stake to deal with another high-profile nickname change. This one isn’t largely theoretical like “Yeti,” either. There are more costs — to say nothing of further public embarrassment — to consider.
Mammoth Hockey, meanwhile, is a small business that manufactures a niche product. Were a judge to side with Mammoth Hockey, a settlement seems like the most likely outcome.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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