When we last mused about the newest professional team in sports, the generically named Utah Hockey Club, they were off to a flying start, breezing through the season’s first week as tops in their conference and making fans in the Tri-State area sit up and take notice with a thrilling overtime victory over the Rangers, which at the time seemed to be a really big deal. And they’re still selling out their outdated Delta Center home rink, albeit with a self-limited cap of 11, 131 seats due to the fact that the arena was never truly designed for hockey and the balance of seats in what has been the 16,500 total capacity home of the NBA Jazz can’t see the entire game at once. Still, it’s a dramatic improvement over the 5000 seat bandbox that their predecessors, the Arizona Coyotes, played their recent seasons in on the Tempe campus of that college hockey powerhouse Arizona State University. The league at large is happy. And their merchandise adorned with that non-name, spurred on by the fact it has a limited shelf life since it was a placeholder until an official nickname could be legally obtained, is still among the league’s overall bestsellers. So for certain Gary Bettman is happy.
But the team itself has come back to earth. They are the epitome of mediocrity at this season’s 50-game point–21-21-8. That point-per-game pace translates to a tie for tenth in the 16-team Western Conference, six points out of one of the two Wild Card playoff berths and just a sliver ahead of how the Coyotes had paced at the equivalent point on the last day of January 2024, where they had 49 points and a 23-22-3 record. And despite that rabid fan base their home record of 8-11-5 is actually worse than their road log of 13-10-3.
Moreover, they are apparently no closer to finalizing a nickname than they originally intended, some facts that came to light this week. As THE ATHLETIC’s Josh Yohe reported earlier this week:
The naming of Utah’s hockey franchise — currently known as Utah Hockey Club — has become a dramatic, lengthy process because of copyright issues in seemingly every direction.
The team announced at a news conference on Wednesday at the Delta Center that three names and accompanying logos will be voted upon by fans attending each of Utah’s next four home games, starting with Utah Hockey Club’s home game Wednesday against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Six names were initially considered when the franchise, formerly the Arizona Coyotes, relocated to Salt Lake City last summer: Blizzard, Hockey Club, Mammoth, Outlaws, Venom and Yeti.
Yeti was a very popular choice among fans, and many people expected it to become the Utah nickname.
However, the franchise and the NHL, after much conversation, have decided to ditch the possibility of the name Yeti because of a copyright snag with Yeti coolers.
But that was Wednesday. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’s Tom Dierberger hurriedly dropped some breaking news yesterday:
The Utah Hockey Club is bringing another name back into consideration as it looks to land on an permanent team name ahead of the 2025-26 NHL season.
Shortly after the franchise ran into issues with the U.S. Patent Office over its favored name, the “Yetis,” it added three names back into the fold for fans to vote on—the Utah Mammoth, Utah Wasatch and Utah Hockey Club. However, after the first night of fan voting, the franchise changed its mind.
Utah announced Thursday that the “Utah Outlaws” nickname is now back in the mix for the fan voting.
“We listened to your feedback and dug into all the Qualtrics data from last night’s survey,” Utah Hockey Club said in a statement. “For the team name, it’s clear that Outlaws should be in the mix instead of Wasatch, so we’re swapping it out.”
That’s what happens when your billionaire owner who’s hoping to truly cash in on another wave of new merch happens to run a data company such as Qualtrics. You’re consistently getting quantitative feedback and rejiggering algorithms that ultimately project to financial expectations, so you change the paradigm in real time. And as Dierberger added, there’s some precedence data that influenced yesterday’s pivot:
Unlike Wasatch, the nickname “Utah Outlaws” was among the original 20 team names pitched to the fan base back in May as the voting process began. It advanced past the first round and was one of the six finalists, joining the Utah Blizzard, Utah Hockey Club, Utah Mammoth, Utah Venom and Utah Yeti.
But just as I’ve seen so many times in ostensibly objective research studies, there sure seems to be a strong sense that this extended process is one that the UHC management would rather not be in at the moment. Witness the sales pitch they expressed in Yohe’s earlier piece:
The newly proposed “Wasatch” nickname pivots to a local tie that still conjures images of Yeti, which are known as mountain creatures. The Wasatch Range is a mountain range that runs from the Utah-Idaho border south into central Utah. The U.S. Forest Service says Wasatch is a Ute Indian word meaning “low place in high mountains.”
“It still allows us to honor the mythical snow creature (Yeti) with a Utah appeal,” Smith Entertainment Group executive Mike Maughan said. “We wanted to honor the idea that people have for a mythical snow creature. We wanted to honor the sentiment of one of those names while also including a Utah-centric version.”
Many people believed that Yeti was the likely name for this franchise, but a Plan B was clearly necessary after Smith Entertainment Group decided a legal battle simply wasn’t worth it.
“All of the merchandise, the clothing, the pucks and the mini-sticks … it’s a little hard to launch a brand if you don’t have those things ready to go,” Maughan said. “It put those things on hold. So we decided to move on from the name ‘Yeti.’”
From such a perspective, the most cost-effective Plan B might just be to maintain the status quo. But for what its worth, ATHLETIC readers were given their own chance to respond to the initial three choices and here were the results:
| Name | Percent of vote |
|---|---|
|
Utah Mammoth
|
56 percent
|
|
Utah Hockey Club
|
25 percent
|
|
Utah Wasatch
|
19 percent
|
Source: Survey of The Athletic readers
There actually is a professional sports team with that nickname already–Denver’s entry into the National Lacrosse League, the Colorado Mammoth, which actually shares Ball Arena with UHC’s archrival Avalanche and the 2022-23 NBA champion Nuggets. But I guess there’s more concern with confounding fans of ice chests than laxheads.
We’ll see what the actual sample of roughly 33,453 fans reveals over the next three home games and where it all plays out with the business priorities of the Smiths. If nothing else, it’s gonna make results from the dog days of February for a struggling team on the fringe of post-season eligibility all the more interesting.
Courage…