Utah ready to welcome Coyotes with open arms

SALT LAKE CITY — The NHL team moving from Arizona to Salt Lake City will be known as Utah, at least initially, until a longterm name is determined.

“We’ll start with Utah on the jersey and we’ll figure out the logo and everything else and what it is that we are,” new owner Ryan Smith said. “We’re going to be Utah either way. We have the first part of the name. We don’t have the last.”

Smith Entertainment Group, which bought the franchise formerly known as the Coyotes in a deal unanimously approved Thursday by the league’s Board of Governors, has already contracted ad agency Doubleday & Cartwright for rebranding efforts. Former owner Alex Meruelo keeps the Coyotes name and has the chance to reactivate the franchise if he’s able to build an arena.

The short timeline of relocating the club could mean it has a placeholder name for the first season, like Washington’s NFL team had in 2020 and

’21 before becoming the Commanders.

“It’ll be Utah something, obviously,” Smith said. “It’s really important that we’re not saying, ‘Hey, this has to be ready by the fall,’ especially when it’s going to be Utah something. I think both the league feels better and we feel better to just run the process and then we’ll drop it when we drop it.”

While working on that process, Smith’s first priority is physically moving players and staff to Utah and getting them set up in the state.

“There’s a good roster and a lot of young talent and we’ve got to onboard those people into Smith Entertainment Group and show them what that means and what that’s like,” Smith said.

Then it’ll be “full speed ahead” with the infrastructure, including potential renovations to Delta Center, home of the NBA’s Utah Jazz also owned by SEG, which has 12,000 unobstructed view seats for hockey. The plan is to expand that number to roughly 17,500.