Delta Center is now home to the NBA and NHL. Here’s how staff pulls off the transition between games.

As the last seconds of Utah Hockey Club games tick off the clock at Delta Center, the arena’s overnight turnover crew is in the wings waiting for its cue to get to work.

“They’ll get there 30 minutes before we anticipate the end of the game,” said Dan Knight, Delta Center’s vice president of facilities. “They are standing in the corners with their gloves on, champing at the bit.”

Fans file out after the final buzzer, concessions shut down their shops and teams scurry through the locker room to get home.

But the night has only just begun for the 40-person group tasked with transforming Delta Center from an NHL rink to NBA court. It will take around eight hours, and when the sun rises, the arena will be ready to put on a new show.

Here’s how Delta Center has handled doubling its sporting events between two professional sports leagues.

Initial preparation, ‘narrow’ timeline

Knight and his team were building Delta Center’s new seating arrangements in the arena’s back lot just 48 hours before Utah’s first game. The materials came from Slovakia and would soon seat a historic sell-out crowd.

“The first time we put them in was the first game. The timeline was that narrow,” Knight said. “We had to come up with some creative solutions.”

Delta Center needed to increase its downstairs seating close to the ice while giving people access to level one where the locker rooms and premium clubs are. With the new units, the crew can pull the added seats in and out between the NHL and NBA games.

“The seating that wraps around the corners, right on the ends, that’s our regular seating and we just pull it out to the glass and we fill in around the corners on the two sides,” Knight said. “We had to build units that we roll into place so that we could go to the top down.”

Knight and his team were given the same four-month timeline to get Delta Center ready to host NHL games. While they had some experience with hosting the Frozen Fury for the past four years — a preseason game for the Los Angeles Kings — new equipment was needed to make it Utah-specific.

Delta Center had bought equipment from the Kings around six years ago when they were throwing it away but, at this point, it was not NHL standard.

Knight quickly started ordering everything with the help of Athletic Sports Systems Inc.

“The NHL, they called a company called Athletica, which does all that stuff, and told them, ‘Utah is your priority. Everything is geared towards Utah,’” Knight said. “They were on the phone with us almost daily. They had guys out here, a Canadian company.”

Through seven-day weeks and 10- to 12-hour days, the operations and facilities group turned Delta Center into an NHL arena and have continued to do so on somewhat of a nightly basis.

“At first it was a little bit overwhelming. It’s kind of a heavy lift,” Knight said. “Then it got exciting. It got the be, ‘This is going to be fun.’”

Covering the ice, preserving the court

Right as a hockey game ends, the process of turning Delta Center back into an NBA arena starts immediately.

It initially took 10-12 hours for the crew to complete the changeover, but they’ve gotten it down to an eight-hour shift at the quarter mark of the season.

“That’s kind of been the thought process since the season started — what little efficiencies can we find tonight to make it better,” Knight said. “I’ve got to credit the guys here overnight. Every night they find a new little thing that makes it a little faster. If we store it in this order then it comes out in this order and it’s a little faster.”

Covering the ice is the first priority. An inch-thick fiberglass, foam board is put on top of the inch-and-a-half of ice; the type of board is mandated by the NBA to insulate the court for prime playing conditions. The crew then puts the basketball court — which is broken up into rectangular pieces — on top of the board.

Knight said they have to warm up the ice during this process so that it does not sweat through the wood. The surface temperature is 20 degrees and is raised to about 24 or 25 degrees when the NBA court is placed on top of it.

In addition to the arena cleaning, the overnight group has to pull out and rearrange the added NHL seating, take down the boards, put up the section rails and switch signage.

It takes 40 people to do the changeover — only 10 of which are full-time employees of Delta Center. The arena contracts with a company called Show Ready, which helps put on concerts and other entertainment events. Before the NHL arrived at Delta Center, around 12 people were contracted from Show Ready; now Knight said they ordered 30 for the overnight shift.

A morning crew of 10 people comes in after the heavy lifting is done to put the finishing touches on the transformation. That includes a lot of safety stuff like securing handrails and filling in gaps between risers.

“Just a lot of those details have to be covered so that we are ready for the event. That takes some time and effort,” Knight said.

“We’ve really improved from the first day to today. We’re really getting it down. By the end of the year, it will be perfect, and then it will all change again because we’re going into construction next year to make it all different … . Keeps you going, we have more to do.”

Cultivating the Utah Hockey Club experience

For Elaina Pappas, who is the senior vice president of marketing and oversees game presentation for Smith Entertainment Group (SEG), the arrival of Utah Hockey Club presented the opportunity to create another unique sporting experience for the Salt Lake audience.

The NBA’s Utah Jazz have a clear brand, identity and standing within the community; Pappas was part of the team that did — and continues to — build those same elements around the NHL at Delta Center.

“We are very fortunate to live in a place where our fans are very invested in our community and our teams,” Pappas said. “We knew we had a really good foundation because of our success here with home-court advantage with the Utah Jazz. We wanted to feel like we had that same home-ice advantage for Utah Hockey Club.”

One of SEG’s main goals was to make the Utah Hockey Club games feel like their own world separate from the Jazz. The two teams’ audience overlap is about 25%, Pappas said, which is a bit higher than most markets that share NBA and NHL teams. Accordingly, the fans have been a big part of shaping what hockey is like at Delta Center.

“We really pride ourselves on utilizing Qualtrics, doing surveying, fan experience data. For example, our latest survey with fans — they’re very vocal about music,” Pappas said. “Those are things where we’ve been testing out different things.”

SEG is learning on the go and making nightly adjustments to the in-game activations as Utah Hockey Club continues to build its identity in the inaugural season. It comes down to the little things — the warmup playlists and cadence of music throughout the game, prompts for crowd cheers, graphics on the jumbotron, intermission entertainment on the ice and audience-oriented activities throughout the night.

Some of the in-game experiences have formed naturally, too.

“Bringing in Shaboozey for the first night and then having that be a tradition of playing in the locker room after wins or in the arena for a sing-along is something that just made sense,” Pappas said.

“In the NBA, fans are used to listening to music or prompts almost the entire game whether it’s a defense prompt or just music as the guys are playing. In the NHL that’s not allowed — we can’t play music when the puck is in play.”

All of these additions have helped the community connect to Utah Hockey Club and embrace the rowdy, loud, electric and passionate atmosphere that the NHL brings. It has also furthered Delta Center’s reputation as the place to be.

“There’s more eyeballs on what we do and there’s more people watching, it feels like,” Knight said. “There’s more people in Salt Lake and they’re looking for things to do — the Delta Center is where you do it.”

Team feeling at home at Delta Center

For a team that played at a 5,000-seat college rink last season, Utah Hockey Club was quick to embrace its new home at Delta Center, which included a brand-new locker room and a loyal fan base.

“I think that the other thing I will mention is the crowd, the atmosphere, the way the fans welcomed our team in Utah, that was pretty cool. And we still feel it every day,” head coach André Tourigny said. “The passion and the commitment — their behavior with the players every game … you can feel they’re happy to take care of the boys. It’s been unreal.”

Utah players have attended a few Jazz games this season, getting an inside look at the team they share an arena with. Jack McBain — who has started the year off strong with 10 goals — was at the home opener, as well as the Spurs and Nuggets games.

“We go down there on the court and it’s pretty cool. They’re some big dudes. They’re really good athletes so it’s fun to watch,” McBain said. “The guys on their team have been great about coming to say hi and being pretty open, too. It’s been a really cool experience having both teams and being able to see their lifestyle and warmup routine and everything.”