Utah’s NHL team might be playing its inaugural season without a nickname, but the startup hockey club has already made quite a name for itself in the market.
The team’s chief commercial officer Chris Barney told reporters on a Zoom call this week that more than 34,000 people have now placed a deposit for season tickets for the team’s inaugural season. During the team’s launch event in late April, owner Ryan Smith revealed that roughly 29,000 fans had paid a $100 deposit to be on the list for season tickets.
Advertisem*nt
That means an additional 5,000 fans have added their name to the list over the past five weeks.
“The demand has been totally overwhelming,” said Barney.
The club is opening the doors of the Delta Center this week to allow prospective season ticket holders to get a glimpse of the arena with the ice surface in place and potentially choose their preferred seats. Since the number of potential season ticket holders (34,000) far exceeds the maximum capacity for NHL hockey at the Delta Center — which is expected to reach as high as 16,000 for this season — some fans may come up short when trying to secure season tickets for the 2024-25 campaign. At this point, the demand is going to heavily outweigh the supply.
“The math just doesn’t work for everybody to get a seat,” said Barney.
But that is an enviable problem to be facing heading into the first season of NHL hockey in Salt Lake City.
Delta Center is absolutely jammed here for the introduction of the NHL players and staff. pic.twitter.com/ABnPWrN6Bx
— Ian Mendes (@ian_mendes) April 24, 2024
With so many people flooding the market looking for tickets, the hockey team is looking for creative ways to figure out how to maximize its audience this season. Barney says there are a “bunch of levers we will pull” to figure out how to cap the season ticket number, allowing fans to purchase tickets in smaller quantities, such as half-season packages, mini packs or single games.
“The stated goal is to give as many people to have an opportunity to be in the building as possible,” said Barney.
To that end, the club is still fiddling around with the seating capacity for this season. The Delta Center was originally built as a facility dedicated to basketball, so engineers and designers are still studying ways to add as many seats as possible on nights when the arena is hosting an NHL game.
Advertisem*nt
“There is some configuration stuff that we’re still working on,” said Barney. “And in the spirit of trying to get as many people into the building as humanly possible, we’re actually trying to add more seats in every nook and cranny we can.”
Whatever they are able to accomplish in 2024-25, it will be a vast improvement over the maximum seating capacity of 4,500 the team played in front of at the Mullett Arena while they were the Arizona Coyotes last season.
Barney says the Utah team will have a seating capacity of 16,000 for “select games” in the 2024-25 season. The seating capacity may rise or fall, based on the day of the week or the opponent. Visits from superstars like Connor McDavid or Sidney Crosby might call for the maximum 16,000-seat configuration, while other teams coming for a midweek game in Salt Lake City might play to a smaller capacity. Once the NHL schedule is released later this summer, the club will have a firm idea of how the capacity will shift for certain games.
The reason for the fluctuation is the club readily admits 10,000 seats will have a clear and unobstructed view of the ice surface next season, but up to an additional 6,000 seats could be available with a “partial ice view.” Certain portions of the ice would not be visible from those seats, given the steep curvature of the arena bowl.
Utah’s NHL team has decided to discount the partial-ice-view seats, pricing them starting as low as $19.
Club officials recently reached out to the New York Islanders to learn how they handled their temporary stay at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for four seasons from 2015 to 2019. That facility was also a basketball-first arena, with a configuration for hockey that left many seats with an obstructed view.
“We’re trying to be very smart with partial-ice-view seats. We’re trying to provide the best experience for fans,” said Barney. “The goal is to ensure the best possible experience while maintaining some fan-friendly pricing and accessibility options.”
Advertisem*nt
Over the coming years, the plan is for the Delta Center to undergo a fairly radical transformation that will allow it to host both the NBA’s Jazz and the NHL team with no limitations on spectator sightlines for either sport. As those modifications are slowly phased in, team officials expect the number of unobstructed view seats to rise accordingly. When those renovations are completed, the hockey team hopes to have a seating capacity that includes 17,000 seats with a clear, unobstructed view of the ice surface for NHL games.
“We anticipate more unobstructed seats opening over the next several years as changes are made to the arena,” said Barney.
But in this early honeymoon phase, fans might just want a chance to be inside the Delta Center — even if their seat doesn’t have a completely clear view of the entire ice surface. There is a palpable buzz in the market about the hockey team and Barney says team officials were quite surprised to learn of the makeup of their new fans.
The team says of the 34,000 season ticket deposits they received, 92 percent of them came from non-Utah Jazz season ticket holders. And more than 60 percent of the people with season ticket deposits did not even attend a single event inside the Delta Center last season. In other words, they appear to be unlocking a new group of sports fans with the arrival of NHL hockey in Salt Lake City.
“We have an incredible opportunity to cultivate this new crowd and this new audience,” Barney said.
Barney said that in addition to receiving thousands of season ticket deposits from fans in Salt Lake City, they also received plenty of deposits from neighboring states that are within driving distance from the Delta Center. They even received some deposits from fans on the Eastern seaboard.
Despite the wide interest from a variety of states, the club has announced that season tickets for the inaugural season will be first offered to deposit holders with a Utah zip code.
Advertisem*nt
Fans with a season ticket deposit will have a chance to start purchasing their tickets this month, on a first-come, first-serve basis. That means the fans who placed their deposits down the earliest — back in April — will have the first crack at purchasing tickets. If fans with a deposit miss out on purchasing season tickets because the club has reached capacity, they will be given priority to purchase smaller ticket packages and single-game seats.
Utah’s NHL officials are still in awe they have been able to pull all of this off in relatively short order. They only secured the team in late April, but appear ready to host preseason NHL games at the Delta Center in late September.
“Nobody has done anything in the time frame we’re doing it. We’ve got 112 days — not that I’m counting,” said Barney. “What we’re doing is unprecedented from the standpoint of getting a deposit list that big that quick and fulfilling it before the season starts.”
Barney said team officials are confident that even with some last-minute configurations to the Delta Center, they will be ready for puck drop this fall. They won’t require the NHL to schedule Utah for a handful of road games to open up the 2024-25 season to give them an extra runway to make sure the arena has addressed all of the issues.
“We’ll be ready to roll,” said Barney. “Whenever the league tells us to be ready, we’ll be ready.”
(Photo: Chris Gardner / Getty Images)
Ian Mendes is a senior writer covering the NHL. Prior to joining The Athletic in 2021, he spent seven years as an afternoon talk show host for TSN 1200 in Ottawa and as a contributing writer for TSN.ca. He also worked as a television reporter and host with Rogers Sportsnet for 12 years and has served as a feature columnist for both The Ottawa Citizen and Today’s Parent magazine. Follow Ian on Twitter @ian_mendes
