When an NBA coach draws up a play, spacing matters.
It turns out that’s true in the locker room, too.
Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy took a unique approach this summer after being asked to help design the team’s new game-day space: “We wanted to make the space a little more intimate,” Hardy said.
That might sound like spin. After all, the Smith Entertainment Group was looking for ways to add a second locker room inside the Delta Center after buying the Utah Hockey Club last spring. Shrinking one to help build a second made sense.
But Hardy insists he had a vision in mind when team owner Ryan Smith asked him to play a pivotal part in the first stage of the arena’s renovations.
“Ryan letting me be a huge part of the design process of that was really cool,” Hardy said. “I wasn’t expecting it.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The new Utah hockey club locker room is pictured at the Delta Center on Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, in Salt Lake City.
The first issue for the Hockey Club’s locker room: There weren’t a lot of obvious locations around the arena’s first floor to build. The vast majority of the space was already taken up by functions the building was using for Jazz games and all of its other events. It was also important that the locker room and benches were on one side of the arena, opposite the television cameras.
In the end, it was the Jazz’s family and media rooms that were relocated to the other side of the arena, away from the locker rooms. Walls were blasted, and over the course of a few months, the Hockey Club’s locker room was created nearly adjacent to the Jazz’s. The two teams now share a weight and workout room in between the two.
The result was a hockey locker room that is large and bright. A huge entryway leads players right out to the central tunnel where they skate onto the ice.
The room’s ceiling has LED lights shaped like a hockey rink, with a big puck with the Utah Hockey Club’s logo in the middle. Players’ dressing spaces are organized by positions, though they leave some of their equipment in a separate changing room in the back.
The first-floor changes also gave the Jazz a chance to redesign their locker room after the organization finished its summer league play.
Hardy started with one philosophy: bigger isn’t always better.
In particular, he felt the Jazz’s existing locker room space, which was created in 2017 in the bowels of the Delta Center, was a bit too cavernous, a bit too ... impersonal.
Hardy called making the room smaller his No. 1 priority in the redesign.
And for what it‘s worth, at least some of the Jazz players agree with the idea of a smaller as better. Take Patty Mills, the 15-year NBA veteran who has played for six NBA teams, including a decade with the championship-winning San Antonio Spurs.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Utah Jazz locker room at the Delta Center, Friday, Nov. 1, 2024.
“If there’s separation between each locker and one guy’s on the other side of the room to the other, then you don’t talk,” Mills said.
In doing the remodel, the Jazz also got the chance to change how the locker room looks across the board. The obvious emphasis was on the team’s purple and mountain-themed branding; the mountain logo now appears in the middle of the carpet and above every player’s locker.
For Hardy, getting two film-viewing TVs in the room was important. With just one TV, “when you’re standing in the middle of the room as the coach, somebody can’t see the screen,” Hardy said. The team’s star, Lauri Markkanen, has his locker in the exact center of the room. He joked he doesn’t know which screen to look at, now that his eyes are caught by two televisions.
Markkanen’s placement is no accident — the team wanted him in the center of the locker room to lead his teammates. In general, Hardy said he and the rest of the coaching staff thought heavily about where to put each player.
“It’s really about who we want spending time together. You want a mix of veterans and young players sitting next to each other,” Hardy said. “You don’t know all these guys perfectly, no coach does, but you know their personalities well enough to know, like, who could maybe balance out who.”
There is still one change left to make, though. According to Jazz player Collin Sexton — and Hardy agrees — the lights are a bit too bright before the team’s games. He wants them to be dimmer “just so that you can be calm going out there and be in a good head space.”
These are just the first steps of the Delta Center renovations — much more is coming as the Smith Entertainment Group uses the estimated $575 million of taxpayer money to reinvent the Delta Center one half at a time. Each endline’s rebuilding is expected to take all of the 2025 and 2026 offseasons, if the plan goes to schedule.
But what Hardy has seen so far, he likes.
“I think it came out really, really nice,” he said. “I think it gives our team a really good feel.”
