Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Ryan Smith didn't know how high the number had climbed.
"Where are we at?" he asked as he sat on a dais next to NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and his wife, Ashley, on Friday.
The figure? 22,700. That's how many people had made deposits for season tickets for Utah's yet-to-be-named NHL club.
"OK, that's good," he said, drawing laughs from a crowd that included Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and other local officials, university presidents, and even Elder Ronald A. Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Good, yes, but not that unexpected.
The Utah Jazz have a sellout streak that is quickly approaching 300 games; Utah football has sold out every game dating back to 2010; Real Salt Lake games are well attended; and BYU fans regularly pack the Marriott Center and LaVell Edwards Stadium. Utah loves its sports.
That number, though, presented a bit of an issue. The NHL team will open at the Delta Center with 12,000 unobstructed views and an additional 4,000-plus obstructed ones. How will they handle that demand?
"Oh, the problems you can have!" Bettman said.
They're problems the league is eager to take on after what it left in the desert with the now-deactivated Coyotes.
Utah has a team because the league had a problem to solve in the desert. What was supposed to be a stopgap solution for the Arizona Coyotes had begun to make Bettman and the league nervous. The Coyotes played at Mullett Arena, a 4,600-person college arena on the Arizona State campus, as it looked for a permanent home.
Mullett is a nice enough college venue — it's intimate, loud and even modern — it's just small … and walking to the locker rooms present the real issues. Players go through makeshift tunnels into a room that lacks the amenities of a major league venue.
"The belief was that this was going to be temporary — three years," Bettman said at a press conference in Arizona Friday morning. "Even if there was a fourth year, if a building was coming out of the ground, people would understand and be excited and we get through it. But as things have now played out … it became clear to me that not only had the timeline stretched, we were still dealing with uncertainty."
Bettman said playing in the arena for potentially five more seasons wasn't "fair to the players on the Coyotes. It's not fair to the players on the other teams that come in. It's not a major league facility, and the prospect of possibly playing playoff games there or a Stanley Cup final, it just didn't work."
So Bettman came up with a plan — a plan he expected to be laughed at when he first brought it to the NHL's executive committee. The plan was to deactivate the Coyotes and sell their hockey operations assets to an eager group in Utah that had been knocking at his door for two years.
That would establish a new Utah franchise and allow the Coyotes to find a solution to the stadium without players having to play in a college rink for the better part of a decade.
Ryan Smith first met Bettman for dinner two years ago following the NBA Board of Governors meetings. The two exchanged numbers and Smith kept hounding him about the prospect of an expansion team in Utah. In January, the Jazz owner publicly stated his intentions to bring an expansion franchise to the state. The Utah Legislature showed it was on board, voting for and signing SB272, which would provide funding for a downtown arena project. That all caught the NHL's eye.
In Utah, Bettman saw a quick fix to what had been a long-term problem.
"While they didn't think we were crazy," he said of the executive committee, "they were skeptical that it could be done; and I think everybody was skeptical that we could pull it all together."
He first approached Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo on March 6 about the plan; Meruelo said no. A couple of weeks later, though, the Coyotes owner had come to grips with the situation. He, frankly, couldn't tell Bettman and the league when a new arena would be ready for his team. So he agreed to make the deal with one condition: If he can build a suitable arena in five years then he can reactive the Coyotes as an expansion franchise.
Four weeks later, a new team was announced in Utah. The players, coaches and front office members who once called themselves Coyotes are now part of Utah's NHL team.
"In the space of about a month, the unimaginable has been accomplished," Bettman said.
There are plenty of things still to figure out. The team doesn't have a name or a place to practice, and there needs to be some short- and long-term Delta Center renovations (which has become the preferred option rather than building a new arena). The organization has full confidence that everything will be ready to go when the team and players arrive for next season.
But what about the high-ticket demand?
"We might offer partial season packages and some of that, but that's exciting," Smith said. "I told the players, 'We'll get everyone there on the first year, and it's your job to keep them there.'"
