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The Mammoth are on pace for 105 points in their second season in Utah. Rob Gray / Imagn Images
Four years before the Utah Mammoth became an overnight success story, Bill Armstrong found himself managing the NHL’s worst team.
Do you want to talk about bleak?
That group was outscored 56-22 during a crash-and-burn 1-12-1 start to the 2021-22 season. Amid a raging tire fire, the only signs of hope — undetectable to those outside the organization — came from a draft class from a couple of months earlier. It was impossible to know at the time, though, that Armstrong and his scouting staff had mined at least four bona fide NHL players, including Dylan Guenther, in that draft.
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Fast forward to where the Mammoth are today — hovering near the top of the league standings with a 9-5-0 record despite navigating a road-heavy schedule — and there’s just about no resemblance to what the Arizona Coyotes were then. But they are clear beneficiaries of an aggressive rebuild that started in the desert and appears to be delivering results ahead of schedule as the team embarks on Year 2 in Utah.
“We’ve never jumped off the plan,” Armstrong told The Athletic this week. “We’re right where we’re supposed to be.”
Not only did the Mammoth begin the season with a new identity after rolling out their team branding in the spring, but they set a clear goal: making the playoffs. The organization hasn’t accomplished that at the end of an 82-game regular season since 2012.
Of course, they’re effectively a brand-new organization following the April 2024 relocation to Salt Lake City, where they’ve found strong support from owners Ryan and Ashley Smith and been provided with the kind of facilities they could once only dream of.
“We have a TV set in the video room where the players meet every morning that is probably worth more than our entire facility was in Arizona,” said Armstrong.
It’s proven to be an ideal setting for the fruits of the rebuild to blossom.
The roster-building strategy that Armstrong’s staff embarked on in 2021 may not have been revolutionary, but it also carried no guarantee of success. As Armstrong puts it: “We had a plan to gut the team and grab assets and then draft well, build a good scouting staff, and go to work.” They had to take their lumps in the process and remain resolute amid some bleak stretches of play — something, ironically, that might have been aided by the penny-pinching ways of the previous ownership group in Arizona, which was never going to abruptly alter course by trying to fast-track things with splashy free-agent signings while playing out of a college rink.
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While the Mammoth’s strong start this season is being driven by some Coyotes holdovers, including captain Clayton Keller, it’s also come with 20-year-old Dmitry Simashev skating alongside Mikhail Sergachev at times on the top defense pairing. The team’s second line is entirely a product of the rebuild — Logan Cooley between J.J. Peterka and Guenther — and each of those players is now under contract through at least 2029-30.
The Mammoth made a pretty good account of themselves last season, riding a 17-9-4 finish to an 89-point campaign, but they arrived at work in September ready to raise the ceiling again.
“Just ever since Day 1 of training camp, there was a different feel around our team,” Keller said. “We were more settled in in Utah. Just our group as a whole has gotten so much better year after year. Our young guys have made such a big step in a quick amount of time — like quicker than most young guys would take. There’s just a good beat about our team right now.
“We’re having fun, we’re working for each other and we’re a really close group. We just want to do everything we can to win.”
The improvements at even strength have been incremental but are reflected in the Mammoth’s 53.3 percent expected-goal rate and 54.3 percent goal rate, both of which rank sixth leaguewide.
In the eyes of André Tourigny, they have benefited from the school of hard knocks. The fifth-year head coach noticed a difference in the way opponents started approaching games with his team last season and felt his group repeatedly gave up points due to puck mismanagement or impatience on nights when it otherwise played well.
“You need to go through it,” Tourigny said. “Your parents can tell you all your life, ‘Don’t do that,’ or ‘Be careful of this.’ When you go through it, it’s just to realize ‘Ah, Mom was right,’ or ‘Dad was right.’ That’s just the way it is.
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“I think that was maybe a tough pill to swallow at the time, but now we took our medicine and we learned from it. It’s not over, but we’ve been through some battle scars and that helps now.”
The Mammoth have been one of the NHL’s best stories to start a season where disruption is in the air, but there’s recognition that they’ve still got a long way to go. The Olympic-compressed schedule is unrelenting this season. After games Saturday and Sunday at Montreal and Ottawa, Utah will have played 11 times on the road compared to just five times at Delta Center.
This opening stretch could have broken them.
As much as they’ve leaned on veteran free-agent signings like Nate Schmidt, Ian Cole, Brandon Tanev, Kevin Stenlund and Vitek Vanecek to augment the bottom half of the roster, it’s trial by fire for the younger players up the lineup. For example, the Peterka-Cooley-Guenther trio finds itself going head-to-head against the NHL’s best forwards every night.
They’ve posted a 55.5 percent expected-goals rate across 141 five-on-five minutes and outscored opponents 12-7 in the process, per Natural Stat Trick.
“When we played at home, I played them against (Nathan) MacKinnon and I played them against (Nikita) Kucherov, so they can not go against way worse (matchups) on the road,” Tourigny said. “Defensively, they’re really good. Gunner and Cools, they’re guys who (make) really good reads defensively, and I will say the progression of Peterka since the start of the season, and his commitment defensively and his detail, he’s improved a lot. I’m proud of him for that.
“So, I’m not hiding them at all.”
Armstrong said he’ll likely take an aggressive approach ahead of this season’s March 7 trade deadline, trying to add more pieces to give his team the best chance possible to push for the playoffs.
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But the overarching plan remains unchanged. The Mammoth are just scratching the surface with a prospect pool that was ranked seventh overall by The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler earlier this year and has since added Caleb Desnoyers, Max Psenicka and Stepan Hoch to the fold through the 2025 draft.
There’s another internal push yet to come.
“It’s the Daniil Buts, it’s the Simashevs, it’s the Desnoyers coming in for us that will push on the next wave,” Armstrong said. “It’s about how good can we be in the next four years and then we’re going to get into some championship windows. That’s the plan.”
After some rough years and a relocation, there’s plenty to feel good about already.
“Where we are now is there’s a good prospect pool, there’s still a lot of picks to go and there’s a good team on the ice,” Armstrong said. “Now we have elite facilities, too. There’s not many people who can say all of that about their organization. We’re in the game in every aspect of it. If you want to go to taxes, we’ve got good taxes in Utah. It’s a beautiful place to live. You’ve got two elite buildings with an unbelievable ownership group — Ryan and his wife, Ashley, and SEG. And you’ve got some talent that’s pretty exciting on the ice with more coming in the American League and more coming in junior.
“I think we need to be patient with the process and continue to push the envelope to see how good we can be, while knowing that we’re not fully done. We’re 60 percent done. There’s more to go.”
NHL rebuilds elsewhere have stalled out or plateaued prematurely, but this one has maintained a steady upward trajectory into the start of its fifth season. The Coyotes/Mammoth went from 57 to 70 to 77 to 89 points in the standings and saw their goal differential narrow from minus-106 to minus-71 to minus-18 to minus-10.
Based on the early results of 2025-26, they’re poised to take another leap — currently plus-7 in goal differential and on pace for a 105-point season.
“That’s the exciting part,” said Armstrong. “How good can we be?”
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Chris Johnston is a senior writer covering the NHL for The Athletic. He has two decades of experience as an NHL Insider, having appeared on Hockey Night in Canada and the NHL Network before joining TSN in 2021. He currently hosts the “Chris Johnston Show” on the Steve Dangle Podcast Network. He’s written previously for the Toronto Star, Sportsnet and The Canadian Press. Follow Chris on Twitter @reporterchris
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