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Nick Bjugstad walked out of a meeting with the Utah coaching staff following Friday’s morning skate still in full uniform when somebody yelled, “Five minutes ’til the first bus!” “I can do it,” Bjugstad, in his 13th season, yelled back while laughing as he began to strip out of his gear. But when he realized a Utah TV reporter wanted to grab him for an interview in advance of the club’s game against the Wild and he had also committed to doing a quick radio hit with the local Minnesota sports station, Bjugstad – the epitome of ‘Minnesota nice’ – said, “I’ll take the second bus.” That’s when the director of team services approached and told Bjugstad he could Uber back to the team’s hotel. Just give him the receipt and he’d make sure Bjugstad was reimbursed.
In every conversation with a former Arizona Coyotes player, you can sense how refreshing it is to be playing for an owner – Ryan and Ashley Smith and the Smith Entertainment Group – so committed to treating them right after an accelerated $1.2 billion purchase to move an entire franchise virtually overnight. This goes beyond a $20 Uber ride Bjugstad can easily afford. He said, “There’s no excuses anymore. We’ll stay in the best hotel in the city, we’ll make sure we have the best food on the road, the best of everything.” They figured out a way to build a temporary practice facility at the Olympic Oval in Kearns, Utah, that was used for speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics. They built a practice rink on an island right in the middle of the Oval, buying time for the permanent facility to be built by the fall of 2025 in nearby Sandy.
The Smiths are also leading a downtown revitalization proposal to reimagine a sports and entertainment district just east of Delta Center. Currently, there are 11,131 unobstructed seats in the arena and another 5,000 where portions of the ice can’t be seen. Luckily, the building has an enormous, picture-perfect center-ice scoreboard that fans can look at if they can’t see part of the game. Yet despite only counting the 11,131 unobstructed seats as capacity, well more than that have been attending games.
The Utah Hockey Club has won seven games in a row on the road and is 6-0-2 in its past eight, 8-1-3 in its past 12, and pulled within a point of a playoff spot in the Western Conference Sunday with a shootout loss to Anaheim. This is no longer the Coyotes, where Armstrong’s edict was simply to meet the cap floor, acquire dead-money contracts for essentially retired players to help him do that and gobble up as many draft picks and prospects as possible. Yet because of the latter, the future in Utah is bright with a core that includes Keller, Guenther, Logan Cooley, Lawson Crouse, Nick Schmaltz, and Michael Kesselring (who has soared in the wake of injuries to Sean Durzi and John Marino) and prospects on the horizon such as Maveric Lamoureux, Tij Iginla, Dmitriy Simashev, and Daniil But.
A lot of people start a rebuild, not many people finish it. You don’t want to change the plan depending on what’s going on day-to-day. But this summer, we were able to get some players like Sergachev to help push the process along. You’re getting some pieces that allow you that opportunity to become better and take that next step. The Sergachevs of the world joining the Kellers, the Crouses, and the Cooleys and Guenthers and that. We added Cup winners – Sergachev, (Kevin) Stenlund, (Ian) Cole, (Robert) Bortuzzo. When we’re going through the rough times and we have some injuries, those guys keep that ship going pretty straight for us.
Armstrong laughed when asked what he considers the timeline for Utah’s rebuild. “I was in Montreal last year and I pointed to the banner when somebody asked me the same question,” Armstrong said. “I pointed to their last Cup banner and I go, ‘Thirty years ago you won a Stanley Cup.’ There’s a patience aspect that has to go into this where you have to look at the numbers and you’ve got to do the research. The research is that the quickest team ever to come out of the rebuild was the Penguins and they did it with Sidney Crosby, Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang. They did it within a five-year period. Most rebuilds are somewhere between five to 16 years sometimes to get it done.
When asked what he considers the timeline for Utah’s rebuild, Armstrong said, “I was in Montreal last year and I pointed to the banner when somebody asked me the same question,” Armstrong said. “I pointed to their last Cup banner and I go, ‘Thirty years ago you won a Stanley Cup.’ There’s a patience aspect that has to go into this where you have to look at the numbers and you’ve got to do the research. The research is that the quickest team ever to come out of the rebuild was the Penguins and they did it with Sidney Crosby, Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang and they did it within a five-year period. Most rebuilds are somewhere between five to 16 years sometimes to get it done. We’re in Year 4 and we’ve been able to, because of COVID and the bad contracts, we were able to accelerate that in the sense of we were able to get a lot more quantity of really good prospects early on. They’re going to filter in the next three to four years. But the good news is the team on the ice right now is a good team and then we’re going to look to add one or two of our prospects to come in over the next few years and you’ll see the team kind of grow and get better. But as Armstrong quickly reiterated, the excuse factor of the Coyotes’ yesteryear and their old ownership is gone. “When you talk about the bull-, you’re dealing with the negative,” Armstrong said. “Constant stories of negativity. After a while, that gets to players. They want to go to the rink and concentrate on hockey and whether you play bad or well or good, you’re just dealing with hockey. So that makes it easier for the players instead of all the negativity that they couldn’t control that surrounded them.
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