When you’re the Utah Hockey Club, giving away 2,000 tickets to a regular-season game is a cause for celebration, not alarm.

After all, not every pro sports team team has an unused inventory of ‘single goal view seats’ that it can tap as a tool to help entice new fans.

It started with a simple tweet from Utah Hockey Club owner Ryan Smith ahead of the club’s home game against the Vancouver Canucks last Wednesday.

In a followup, Smith said that he’d planned to give away the eight seats in his owner’s suite. But when he got more than 700 responses, he decided to open the invitation wider.

In the end, he put 2,000 extra people into Delta Center on top of the usual sold-out crowd of 11,131. And the fans got a good show as Utah staged a third-period rally from a 2-0 deficit before Mikhail Sergachev buried the game-winner on a 2-on-1 with 12 seconds left in overtime.

Acquired in a trade with the Tampa Bay Lightning during the 2024 NHL draft weekend, Sergachev has been a massive difference-maker for the Utah team in its first season in its new home. Helping to fill holes after fellow veteran blueliners John Marino and Sean Durzi went down early with long-term injuries, 26-year-old Sergachev is averaging 25:45 a game, third-most in the entire NHL.

With eight goals and 26 points in 33 games to date, the two-time Stanley Cup winner is also on pace to match his previous career high of 64 points in a season, set in 2022-23.

Another standout has been goaltender Karel Vejmelka. The 28-year-old now sits second in the NHL with 16.5 goals saved above expected according to MoneyPuck, and has amassed a career-best save percentage of .918.

After their vagabond years in Arizona, including their last two seasons as secondary tenants at 4,600-seat Mullett Arena on the campus of Arizona State University, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the re-established Utah team would come out of the gate as road warriors. Unbeaten in regulation in their last eight games, with a record of 6-0-2, they’re up to 11-6-2 on the road this season.

Utah’s home win over Vancouver last Wednesday boosted the squad to 5-5-3 on home ice. The club followed up on Sunday with a 5-4 shootout loss to the Anaheim Ducks, which has the team just outside of the Western Conference wild-card picture with one more game to go before the NHL’s three-day holiday break — hosting the Dallas Stars as part of a 13-game slate on Monday.

On Dec. 2, the Stars earned a 2-1 win at the Delta Center — Utah’s only regulation loss since Nov. 24. The Western Conference standings are tight, but the new club is trending positively toward making the playoffs in its inaugural season. The Coyotes’ only post-season appearance in the franchise’s last 12 years came as part of the expanded 24-team field in the 2020 pandemic bubble, when they eliminated the Nashville Predators in the best-of-three qualifying round before falling to the Colorado Avalanche.

Of the ice, Smith and his wife and co-owner, Ashley, have already helped make winners out of their 31 fellow NHL owners. Smith Entertainment Group’s $1.2 billion purchase of Arizona’s hockey assets last April fueled a 140 percent increase in the valuation of the franchise — a key metric in the league’s 44 percent increase in average valuations in 2024 per Forbes estimates, which dramatically outpaces the growth of the other North American sports over the last year.

The rosy economic picture for the Utah Hockey Club and the league as a whole bodes well for the next round of collective bargaining. While the current deal is not set to expire until the end of the 2025-26 season, commissioner Gary Bettman indicated at the league’s board of governors’ meetings in Florida earlier this month that he and NHL Players’ Association executive director Marty Walsh plan to start formal discussions in February, with an eye toward potentially completing an agreement before the end of this hockey year.