Somehow, it will be. The Utah Hockey Club doesn’t have a nickname yet — the Yetis seems to be the front-runner — but that could certainly be its slogan. Hockey, in Utah?
Somehow, it will be. An
NHL-caliber facility wedged into the basketball-only Delta Center?
Somehow, it will be. A team, a home, a practice facility, an identity and a culture rising from the ashes of the Arizona Coyotes in just a few months?
Somehow, it will be.
And somehow, it is. On Tuesday night, in front of perhaps 16,000 fans — up to 5,000 of whom will have paid for the privilege of not even being able to see one of the goals thanks to the quirks of the arena — Utah Hockey Club will step onto the ice at Delta Center in its home blues and become the 53rd incarnation of a National Hockey League team, a five-month-old franchise hosting the 98-year-old
Chicago Blackhawks.
The way Smith and his team sell it, it’ll look like NHL hockey in an NHL rink.
Somehow, it will be. It’ll also look like a deliberately planned, well-thought-out, carefully executed and plotted long-term plan come to fruition.
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The fear around the NHL — a perfectly reasonable fear — is that Delta Center is going to be Barclays Center 2.0. That it’ll be an awkward fit, a poor venue for hockey, with huge swaths of seats unable to see the full sheet of ice. Yet another inferior, embarrassing situation for these players to deal with. The New York Islanders escaped crumbling Nassau Coliseum for shiny Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2015 and promptly signed a 25-year lease. Five years later, they slinked back to the Coliseum until the new UBS Arena could be built.
Everything about Barclays was wrong — the seats that didn’t face the rink, the seats that couldn’t see one of the goals, the much-mocked SUV behind the glass in one corner. There was no press box in the early days, with fans peering over reporters’ shoulders as they wrote at folding tables in the corner. The locker rooms were bare bones. And the scoreboard hung not over center ice, but over one of the blue lines.
Mullett Arena was comically small, and players had to walk outside to get to their locker rooms, but it was a spectacular place to watch a game. It was unique in the pro sports world and had a certain charm. Unacceptable as Mullett was, for those who lived through the Islanders’ Brooklyn era, it was conceivable that Delta Center actually could be a step down.
Well, here’s some good news: The scoreboard is in the correct spot at Delta Center.
“Directly over center ice,” Olson said with a laugh. “To the centimeter.”
Delta Center is not perfect. Not by a long shot. Five thousand obstructed view seats is an awful lot, and 11,000 normal seats is terribly insufficient. But the club is fortunate that it’s not one of those old rinks wedged into a couple of square city blocks. It’s a sprawling building with room (and rooms) to spare.
But it’s how Olson and his crew are using that space that is most encouraging.
No NHL regulation mandates that teams have to have hallways that connect the locker rooms to the benches. There are several rinks around the league in which players have to enter the ice surface from the corners, not from the benches. Madison Square Garden, one of the most universally beloved arenas, is one of them. And when Salt Lake City hosted a
Los Angeles Kings preseason game in the past, Delta Center made do with a quickly retrofitted auxiliary locker room and the corner entrance. It was good enough.
But Smith and Olson don’t like the way that looks. It’s not “first class,” in their minds. And good enough was no longer good enough.
So rather than save a lot of time and money by rerouting teams to the Zamboni entrances, they completely reconfigured the bowels of the arena, gutting and moving the cash-cow courtside suites (“bunker suites,” in arena parlance) to build direct-access tunnels from the locker rooms to the benches. And that was just the start. They had to build new training areas, new medical areas, new dining areas and a new players’ lounge. They needed to build street lockers for the civilian clothes and hockey lockers for all the gear. They had to find a temporary practice facility at the Olympic Oval in nearby Kearns while simultaneously building a brand-new practice facility that has to be ready by next fall’s training camp.
They had to think of all the little details, too, like a place for the equipment staff to sharpen skates and for players to blowtorch and shape their stick blades. They had to rethink the arena lighting because the reflection off the bright white ice is different than the shine of an NBA hardcourt. They had to create new broadcast locations, address sound issues, tweak some seating. The list seemed endless, and while demolition happened quickly, the construction didn’t start for another month or two.
“We did all that in four months,” Olson said, chuckling at the absurdity of it.
In the long term, the plan is to reconfigure the extremely steep basketball-centric seating to eliminate the obstructed-view seats and increase the capacity. But Utah didn’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to think about that over those frantic few months leading to opening night.
It helped that the 33-year-old Delta Center had been renovated in 2017, so Smith Entertainment Group was able to bring back the same architect and the same contractor. The crew knew what walls were load-bearing, where extra space could be found and how to fit everything without cutting any corners. And as opening night approaches, it’s all just about ready to go.
Somehow.
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