Utah Hockey Club is finally getting a name.
Smith Entertainment Group, owners of the Utah Jazz, acquired majority ownership rights to the NHL team back in April 2024. The news came after a few months of speculation that Ryan Smith, SEG chairman, wanted a team in Utah, and that team would be the now-defunct Arizona Coyotes.
Leaving the franchise, its beloved branding and its name behind, the entire team moved to Salt Lake City to share the Delta Center with the Jazz.
As soon as the Coyotes’ last season in the desert ended, the players visited Salt Lake to see their new home.
It all happened so quickly. The rumors about Utah beginning to spread, Smith submitting a formal request for an NHL team, the sale, the move, the visit.
It makes sense the team was unable to get branding together, even in the offseason. They chose colors — black, light blue and white, but with more obnoxious names — and designed their inaugural jerseys within months. They could only make jerseys available for purchase in mid-November, but that has much less to do with SEG and more to do with jersey manufacturer Fanatics.
Smith wanted fans involved in the naming process, too.
There was a preliminary round of voting between 20 options in May, including the one everyone already assumed would win: the Yeti.
For some reason, I never liked that name. It was too kitschy for me, especially with the last team to be named was the Seattle Kraken. Two cryptid names back-to-back feels like the sports world is running out of ideas. Using a humanoid creature for a mascot and branding is also off-putting to me, but I was in the minority.
Even the players supported the Yeti name. Captain Clayton Keller was believed to have accidentally leaked the name choice to the media in September, and fan-favorite defenseman Sean Durzi said the players had already been throwing the name around in the locker room before it was even up for debate.
The U.S. government struck down the Yeti name because the trademark request was too likely to “cause confusion” with the Yeti cooler brand. As long as they did not spell out “YETI” on their merchandise, they could use the name, but that wasn’t going to be worth it.
With their options limited by the trademark office, three names have been put up for a final vote.
They could remain the Utah Hockey Club, which would apparently just use the previously-designed Yeti branding, the Utah Mammoth or the Utah Wasatch.
The Wasatch, named after the mountain range that surrounds Salt Lake City, was booted out after barely 24 hours.
A hyper-local name would be a good way to build community around the team and make it distinctly Utah, but there was already confusion as to what the Wasatch was and how to pronounce it from the rest of the country and Canada.
The Utah Outlaws name replaced it.
Voting is currently open only in-person at the Delta Center. Fans have also gotten access to what have got to be unfinished logo ideas for each option.
I don’t hate the Utah Hockey Club name as much as some people, but then I would be stuck with the humanoid mascot again.
The Outlaws name offers some fun branding opportunities, but it would be difficult to avoid some sort of gun imagery, and considering what the NFL thinks of that, it could be a little difficult to get past the NHL.
As some fans have pointed out, the Outlaws sounds better for a baseball team, which Utahns are also asking for.
The Mammoth, while cryptid-adjacent, has become the best option. It’s a menacing mascot, more so than a hockey club, at least, with exciting logo opportunities.
#TusksUp was thrown out already as a possible hashtag. They would be sharing a name with a Colorado lacrosse team, but at this point, it is nearly impossible to have a completely new sports team name.
If SEG is apparently willing to repeat names, though, the Raptors would’ve offered accessible and flashy branding opportunities, especially since the Toronto NBA team hardly uses any dinosaur imagery as of recent.
So many fossils have been found in the state that it has an eponymous dinosaur, the Utahraptor, and just about everyone likes dinosaurs as far as I know.
Mammoth will do, I guess.
