A year ago this month, the Arizona Coyotes were playing out the season after being eliminated from the NHL playoffs with a losing record for the fourth year in a row. Home ice was a 4,600-seat college arena but it really wasn’t a home. Half the crowd cheered for the opposing team. It was hard on the players to come off a road trip only to lace up the skates in front of the other team’s fans again. The team’s future was uncertain.
All that changed when Ryan and Ashley Smith bought the franchise and moved it to Salt Lake City. Rebranded as Utah Hockey Club, the team has quickly cemented itself as a mainstay on the state’s growing professional sports scene.
And while there’s a smattering of jerseys from rival teams in the Delta Center at every home game, Utahns have embraced the club since it arrived to a hero’s welcome in a raucous celebration. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall called it a reciprocal outpouring of love and joy, “like we were both finally being seen for who we are and what we’re capable of.” That mutual admiration continued from the first puck drop in October to the final home game last Thursday.
Every game was a sellout. Fans painted the city with rock black, midnight blue and salt white UHC gear — 32,000 hats and 17,000 inaugural season jerseys sold.
About the only thing missing in the inaugural season was a permanent team name and logo. But Smith Entertainment Group says that’s coming.
The National Hockey League blew into Utah one year ago April 18 like a mighty wind. And now a year later, it hasn’t stopped blowing. Salt Lake City is proving to be a hockey town.
“Next week, it marks a year since we walked into a conference room and told every one of these dudes and these guys here to trust us and come to Utah,” Ryan Smith said as the players lined up on the ice and the fans cheered after the final home game last week.
The players and the fans, he said, did their part. “This was a test year. It’s about to get fun.”
To chants of “We want the Cup,” Smith told the crowd, “You’ll get it.”
Players have nothing but praise for the rabid fan base and ownership support. The welcome event and the first game are moments they say they will never forget.
“My standard was set pretty high from that welcome, and it exceeded it,” UHC defenseman Sean Durzi told reporters last week. “It’s almost like the fans kind of sense something special, not only with us but with the state. Everywhere we go now, everyone’s talking about hockey.”
Ironically, all the support overwhelmed the players at first. The second youngest team in the league, they played with too much emotion and pressed too much on the ice and consequently struggled in their new confines. But they eventually settled in and played some of their best hockey at home, staying in the postseason hunt until the few days of the regular season.
Arizona is a distant memory. Utah is home now.
“We’re in a better place. We’re in a place that we’ve got fans that are very passionate about our team. I can’t tell you how excited people in Utah are about hockey. It’s crazy,” said UHC general manager Bill Armstrong, who made the move from Arizona.
“It’s a winter sport town. It just feels right having NHL hockey here. I think it goes hand in hand with Utah. People just love the fact that the NHL’s here.”
The first six months were a whirlwind as Smith Entertainment Group scrambled to get everything in place for the season opener last October.
“I’d be a liar if I sat and told you that a year ago that we knew how this was all gonna go,” said Chris Barney, Smith Entertainment Group president of revenue and commercial strategy.
Having an organizational structure in place with the Jazz certainly was an advantage. But the to-do list was daunting: find practice ice, modify the Delta Center for fans and players, ticketing, uniforms, staffing, sponsorships, broadcasting. It went on and on. There’s no manual for putting a hockey team together in a matter of months.
“We get questions from other franchises all the time like, ‘How the heck did you guys pull that off?’” Barney said.
“It’s just really a testament to all our employees. There’s really no ifs, ands or buts about it. The city stepped up, the county stepped up, the state stepped up. Anyone and everyone was willing to help us.”
Mike Maughan, SEG executive, said it’s amazing to see how many people have “stacked their hands in the middle.”
Since April 19, 2024, SEG has added 852 employees, 241 full-time and 611 part-time. Utah Hockey Club alone employs 103 full-time and 306 total staff members.
Barney said it reaffirms Ryan and Ashley Smith’s commitment to “do and build awesome” things for Utah.
“It is unbelievable to think what’s transpired in just a year,” Mendenhall said. “It’s more than fulfilled our wildest dreams of what it could be.”
Said Maughan, “I think it’s absolutely incredible that not only has it been a year but we’ve already played an entire NHL season even before the one-year anniversary of being awarded a team. I don’t know that anything like that has ever happened.”
And there’s more to come on and off the ice.
The Smiths brought much more than another professional sports franchise to the state. But Salt Lake City didn’t appear to be their first choice for the hockey team’s home. And there was talk of moving their other team, the NBA’s Utah Jazz, to the south end of the Salt Lake Valley.
Mendenhall said, “There’s a whole story around whether or not that was going to happen,” and government leaders feared the worst.
“We were working this conversation hard well before April of last year,” she said. “But also not knowing really how quickly it would end up coming together.”
With persuasion from state and local officials, SEG reversed course and came up with a proposal to give the capital city an extreme makeover and to renovate the Delta Center to accommodate UHC and the Jazz. The Utah Legislature, Salt Lake City Council and Salt Lake County Council all passed measures to facilitate the redevelopment project.
Plans for a multibillion-dollar sports, entertainment, culture and convention district, largely funded by SEG, are solidly in motion, including a sales tax increase in Salt Lake City that took effect in January to help pay for the project. SEG intends to invest $3 billion in downtown.
Mendenhall emphatically states there wouldn’t be a revitalization effort without Utah Hockey Club.
“No. It would be the opposite,” she said, noting how city centers around the country are decaying. “Without the NHL, there’s also no long-term life for the Utah Jazz in Salt Lake City.”
It’s not much of a stretch to say hockey is saving downtown Salt Lake City. And even as the planned district — which could take a decade to complete — moves ahead, the hockey crowd brings a new vibe to the city center. They’re going to restaurants, riding TRAX, walking around town decked out in UHC gear.
While the economic impact of UHC’s first season isn’t fully fleshed out yet, a May 2024 DA Davidson analysis projected it at $288 million. By comparison, a 2022 GSBS Consulting report put the economic impact of the Jazz and other Delta Center events such as concerts at $326 million. The University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute reviewed both studies.
Mendenhall said there’s something “catalytic” between the team and the city and state. “There is something really potent going on here,” she said.
As the mayor rubs shoulders with her peers around the country, she said they wonder how Salt Lake City landed an NHL team and the Winter Olympics, often asking, “How big’s your city?”
Maughan, SEG’s point person on the downtown project, said the company has met with many potential developers and organizations about locating in the district with an eye toward creating a special experience. It also meets regularly with state and local officials.
SEG has visited sports entertainment districts in the U.S., Canada and Europe to gather information about what might work in Salt Lake City and be uniquely Utah.
“I think over the coming months we’ll be able to see a lot of different ideas put forth where people can say, ‘OK, this is what it’s going to look and feel like. This is what we’re going to see moving forward,’” he said.
Maughan summed up the goal for reimagining downtown in a word: activation. The company and government leaders envision a gathering place with things to do whether or not people go to a sporting event or the symphony or a convention.
A three-year renovation project to make the arena more suitable for hockey began when the season ended. But the company couldn’t say when people will begin to see movement outside the Delta Center on the downtown redevelopment that will be years in the making.
“We’ll begin moving just as quickly as possible and we want to do it in the most responsible way possible where we can mitigate the disruption that will happen around those areas,” Maughan said.
Though the inaugural season appears by all accounts to be a success, Utah and hockey are still in the honeymoon phase. Whether the state can sustain the franchise remains to be seen. As in any sport, winning keeps fans in the seats.
“The problem from a sports team perspective is you can’t tell until you put the team there and give it a shot. Is it going to be a thing or not a thing?” said David Berri, a Southern Utah University professor who specializes in sports economics.
Sports requires an emotional attachment not just between fans and teams but among fans themselves, which apparently is happening. People who didn’t know each other before the NHL arrived now gather in homes to watch UHC road games on television.
“If that doesn’t take off, then nothing happens and it just fizzles and goes away. If it does take off, then it’s phenomenally huge,” Berri said.
Season tickets remain in high demand, according to SEG, as 90% of current season ticket holders will renew for the 2025-26 season. It still has 14,000 people on the seat deposit list that swelled to 34,000 in the first month after the team’s arrival.
Regardless of how good a team management puts on the ice, there are variables ownership can’t control, such as injuries. But it’s going all out on the things it can control. One of the big ones is a name and brand identity that the community can rally around. Another is introducing people to the sport.
As Barney put it, the team plans to “evangelize and romance the market.”
“There’s a reason the team is called Utah,” he said. “It’s a team for the entire state.”
Cottonwood Heights resident Tyrel Mortensen needs neither evangelizing or romancing. A lifelong hockey fan and player, the 41-year-old cheered for the New Jersey Devils. His allegiance to the Utah Hockey Club happened overnight. He hasn’t missed a home game this season.
“I think the biggest thing, though, is getting new fans. We had a small community of us that played and were fans before but every game I go to there’s someone like, ‘Oh, this is my first game.’ You fall in love with it so quick. It’s such a fast game. It’s exciting, different,” he said, sporting a Clayton Keller jersey outside the Delta Center before last week’s home finale.
Perhaps those first-timers were there on Barney’s tickets. He said he’s happy to give them away as a way to introduce people to the game.
Fans, players and management have a hard time picking out a season highlight — the welcome event, first home game, Dylan Guenther’s overtime game-winner, seeing Edmonton’s Connor McDavid, arguably the best player in the world, having iconic franchises like the Montreal Canadiens roll into town, seven goals against Seattle.
“There’s just been moment after moment,” Barney said. “We tend to live in an economy now where people try to collect experiences more than they do things, so this year of firsts has really provided a lot of those experiences and those moments for people to collect.”
While UHC plays and will continue to play at the Delta Center, the south end of the valley wasn’t shut out. Smith Entertainment Group bought the Shops at South Town mall in Sandy where it’s building a permanent training and practice facility along with team headquarters. The facility, which will also be available for community use, is scheduled to open in September.
SEG has very much been about community since bringing NHL hockey to Utah, especially when it comes to kids. During the season, more than 10,000 kids participated in one of the team’s youth programs, Learn to Play and Hockey 101. In March, Smith announced that SEG will donate $500,000 to interested entrepreneurs to build up to 20 ice rinks across the state.
West Jordan residents Kim and Dillon Pickens, wearing Keller and Nick Schmaltz jerseys, watched their son and other kids run around with hockey sticks hitting a ball on a makeshift rink during a fan appreciation night on the Delta Center plaza. But their boy is now in his second season of real hockey. His dad’s a coach. They’ve become a hockey family.
“Our kid loves to play starting last year,” Kim Pickens said, “and with the team coming we went all in, made it our whole personality.”
