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SALT LAKE CITY — On Friday night, an NHL prospect will take the stage at the Sphere in Las Vegas and be the first draftee ever to dawn a Utah Hockey Club jersey.
"You're really ushering in a new era," general manager Bill Armstrong said. "It starts at the draft. That's the first kickoff where we walk in there with the Utah colors and go to work."
They will have a lot of work to do.
Utah has an NHL-most 13 draft picks in this weekend's draft, including seven in the first three rounds; and the picks won't end this season. Utah has seven more in the first three rounds in 2026 and six such picks in 2027.
"If you're a scout, this is where you want to be," Armstrong said. "You're picking high and often. It's a really good position to be in."
Armstrong admits, though, that some fortuitous timing was needed to get to that favorable position.
In July 2021, Armstrong traded captain Oliver Ekman-Larsson to the Vancouver Canucks for three draft picks. That started a chain of events that led to the roster being gutted in exchange for more and more draft picks.
"We just so happened to time it around COVID, where the cap just went flat and it stayed flat for a long time," Armstrong said.
Teams that had signed players to long-term deals expecting the cap to rise suddenly had some bad contracts on their hands. Armstrong's team offered relief. He agreed to take on those deals — as long as he got some draft picks, too.
"At the time, nobody had the cap flexibility that we did to take on those contracts," Armstrong said. "And it all started with the OEL trade where we took on a whole bunch of bad contracts, and we're able to get the (Dylan) Guenther pick."
Armstrong selected Guenther with the No. 9 pick in 2021; he now seen as one of the emerging talents in Utah. The 21-year-old forward recorded 18 goals and 17 assists in 45 games last season in Arizona.
Finding players like that in the draft was Armstrong's vision when he began the long rebuild. In 2021, Armstrong also selected JJ Moser, who has played at the NHL level since the 2021-22 season, and Josh Doan, who made his NHL debut last season.
In 2022, Armstrong picked forward Logan Cooley, who played all 82 games for the Coyotes last season as a 19-year-old.
"The high-end players — your No. 1 centers, your No. 1 defensemen, your No. 1 goaltenders are very rarely traded for ... they're usually built through the draft and that's what we've tried to do," Armstrong said.
And he's given his team plenty of bites at the apple to find them.
"It just snowballed, and we amassed a huge amount of picks," Armstrong said. "I don't know if it'll ever be done again in the National Hockey League to acquire that amount of picks in that short of time."
In the end, he chalked the draft asset accumulation up to "puck luck."
"There's a little bit of strategic planning, but yu need a little bit of, I guess, puck luck," he said. "I think we got some puck luck on that one, but there was some strategic planning, and we executed the plan. So little bit of credit on our side, but a little bit of timing and luck, too."
