On this date last year, Utah didn’t have an NHL team. Now, with the Utah Hockey Club’s game against the St. Louis Blues on Tuesday in the books, a 6-1 loss for UHC, Utah’s NHL team has played an entire season.
Utah missed the playoffs, but that doesn’t mean it was an unsuccessful season. GM Bill Armstrong repeatedly said the goal for the team was to play “meaningful games” in March and April — and it did.
“Out of all the teams, we might be in the best shape as an organization,” Armstrong said in an interview before the season. “We don’t really have any bad contracts, we’ve got cap room to add, we’ve got a boatload of picks and a boatload of prospects that are knocking on the door to become NHL players.”
Here’s what we learned about the team in its inaugural season, and what is still to be determined.
What we know
Logan Cooley and Dylan Guenther are studs
There are NHL teams that rely on U23 players for primary scoring, and there are NHL teams that contend for playoff spots. There aren’t a lot of NHL teams that do both simultaneously.
I’ve said it all season and I’ll say it again: Logan Cooley has the highest ceiling of any forward drafted since the turn of the decade, aside from Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini.
As for Dylan Guenther, he just turned 22 and already has arguably the best shot on the planet. The fact that Utah has him signed at $7.1 million for the next eight seasons is the biggest robbery since the “Oceans 11″ heist.
If these guys continue on their current trajectories, Utah will be good for a long time.
The team is trending in the right direction
Cooley and Guenther aren’t the only ones that took big steps this season. In fact, half the team set new career highs in one statistical category or another.
In a recent post-practice conversation, Michael Kesselring expressed that everyone under the age of 28 should still be improving, which is why the team should be better next season even without making any roster moves.
He’s right.
Obviously there’s a lot more to building a successful team than scoring goals, but if you’ve got that part down, everything else becomes much easier.
Hockey WORKS in Utah
If you didn’t get the chance to attend a Utah HC game in person this season, but plan on doing so in the future, here’s some friendly advice: bring earmuffs.
Utah sold out every home game this season — and without exception, every game was loud. The restricted-view seats weren’t open every game at first, but once they realized the desire fans had to be in the building, SEG made them available, too.
Every hat and hoodie in Salt Lake City seems to have a UHC logo on it. Utah’s team store had the second-highest single-day sales at a home rink in NHL history when its jerseys first became available.
Hockey intelligence increased over the course of the season. At first, the fans would boo everything that they perceived to be against Utah: penalties, offside and icing calls, hits, you name it. Now, the boos only accompany bad calls.
With SEG helping fund the construction of new arenas around the state, kids are going to grow up playing hockey. It’s only a matter of time until Utahns are getting drafted left and right.
NHL players like Utah
People always challenge me when I say this, but it’s true: The players have loved being in Utah. In the hundreds of conversations I’ve had this season with both UHC players and visitors, nobody has said a negative thing about the area.
Everyone seems to love the landscape, the people, the passion of the fans and the relative lack of traffic. The players with young children appreciate the safe, family-friendly nature of Salt Lake City.
Does that mean every free agent will put Utah at the top of his list? No. But it probably won’t be at the top of many people’s no-trade lists, either.
What we don’t know
What the team will be called long-term
For everyone wondering about the Utah Hockey Club’s new name, logo and jerseys, it hasn’t been revealed yet. The announcement will come at some point during the offseason, and it’s likely that it will be before the draft (if not at the draft).
The options are Utah Hockey Club, Utah Mammoth and Utah Outlaws.
Where’s the ceiling?
The biggest question mark is whether Utah HC has what it takes to eventually win the Stanley Cup. The team has plenty of blue-chip prospects in its system, but player development is not always a linear process. Not every first-round pick turns into an NHL superstar.
It’s not unlikely that GM Bill Armstrong moves on from picks and prospects in favor of solid players that he can add to the current roster, just as he did this summer to acquire Mikhail Sergachev and John Marino.
If Armstrong can line up everyone’s peak windows together, this could be a Cup-contending team in the near future.
