The National Hockey League will be in Las Vegas this weekend, on the city’s most show-stopping stage, the Sphere. On Monday, a number of stars will become available when the league opens its free agency period.
The Utah Hockey Club — with new fans and a new owner to please — will have the most cap room in the NHL: more than $40 million worth.
With that kind of cash, and against that backdrop, it’d be so easy to go all in.
It’d be so obvious. It’d be so expected.
It also wouldn’t be Bill Armstrong.
“It’s our fourth year into the rebuild,” the team’s general manager said this week. “Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.”
Life is different for the GM right now, but the work remains the same.
You see, Armstrong is finding out that he’s a minor celebrity in Utah. People are waving at him in the street around Salt Lake City, he says. When an Uber picks him up, they know who he is. He says that didn’t happen in Arizona — there were more people in the desert, but more eyeballs on anything else.
There’s no doubt about it: Utahns have firmly focused on their new major league pastime and the soon-to-be-renamed Utah Hockey Club. Those eyeballs, though, don’t just want any hockey in Utah, they want good hockey. Playoff hockey. With sky-high ticket prices, they’ll want to be entertained.
Oh, and that’s not the only source of pressure on Armstrong. He has a new owner to please, Ryan Smith, who just spent over a billion dollars, likely over market value, for his new pro sports team.
Smith also just put a new man in charge: former sports agent Chris Armstrong, of no relation to Bill. Chris Armstrong worked in both the hockey and golf agency fields over the last few years (his most famous client was Utahn golfer Tony Finau), but was promptly named to be the new Hockey Club’s president of hockey operations quickly after Smith acquired the team.
It all adds up to circumstances that would seem to require flash.
Oodles of money? Check. New bosses to impress? Check. An expectant, passionate fanbase? Over 34,000 season ticket deposit checks.
The team could spend big, now. Preferably on a splashy new forward — 57-goal scorer and Cup champion Sam Reinhart and 40-goal scorer Jake Guentzel are both on the free agent market. There were even spurious rumors about Utah acquiring Maple Leafs star Mitch Marner.
But Armstrong disagrees that his team must make
He believes that the team’s front office needs to focus on defense, not offense.
“We need to add a few defensemen to kind of shore up our team and take the next step,” Armstrong said.
He believes that the team should spend some of its available salary cap this offseason — but should save most of it to pay their young prospects later.
“There’s a lot of good things that we can do. But I don’t necessarily think that by filling up our cap we think that we were going to win a Stanley Cup next year,” he said.
He believes that the No. 6 pick in Friday’s draft, and the rest of his 13 picks in the 2024 NHL draft, likely won’t play in the top league right away. “They play huge minutes down there, they’re in a great development role down there, and when they come up, they end up fighting harder.”
He believes that his team can follow in the footsteps of the newly crowned Florida Panthers. “Florida out-hit Edmonton +11 (in Game 7) ... We’re gonna continue to build our team with not only hockey sense, but with some size and some grit.”
And yes, he believes that his team can bring a Stanley Cup to Utah — not now, but later.
Under his plan, the Utah Hockey Club’s success won’t be accelerated. It’ll come when it’s supposed to, when the young players he’s accumulating are ready together. And when it does come, Armstrong thinks this process will culminate in one of the longest periods of sustained success the modern NHL has ever seen.
Time will tell if that time does come. As Utah’s NHL team enters its first offseason, he’s not hoping to take a leap, but a small, sensible step.
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