SALT LAKE CITY — Nick Bjugstad walked out of a meeting with the Utah coaching staff following Friday’s morning skate still in full uniform when somebody yelled, “Five minutes ‘til the first bus!”

“I can do it,” Bjugstad, in his 13th season, yelled back while laughing as he began to strip out of his gear.

But when he realized a Utah TV reporter wanted to grab him for an interview in advance of the club’s game against the Wild and he had also committed to doing a quick radio hit with the local Minnesota sports station, Bjugstad — the epitome of ‘Minnesota nice’ — said, “I’ll take the second bus.”

That’s when the director of team services approached and told Bjugstad he could Uber back to the team’s hotel. Just give him the receipt and he’d make sure Bjugstad was reimbursed.

As more than one person in the locker room joked, “There’s something that wouldn’t fly last year.”

In every conversation with a former Arizona Coyotes player, you can sense how refreshing it is to be playing for an owner — Ryan and Ashley Smith and the Smith Entertainment Group — so committed to treating them right after an accelerated $1.2 billion purchase to move an entire franchise virtually overnight.

This goes beyond a $20 Uber ride Bjugstad can easily afford.

Heck, just the mere fact Utah was staying at the Four Seasons in Minneapolis — voted the “Hotel of the Year” last season by 32 NHL clubs — was notable.

“There’s no excuses anymore,” said Utah general manager Bill Armstrong, who has brought most of his staff to Utah after three seasons running the Coyotes’ hockey operations. “We’ll stay in the best hotel in the city, we’ll make sure we have the best food on the road, the best of everything.

“So we’ve taken the excuse factor out of it. That’s all gone for us. We’re provided with the best so there’s no excuses in our organization. We’re still young, we’re still growing, we’re still getting better, but there’s no excuses as far as the way that we’re treated and all the assets we have to use to be the best.”

From the moment the players touched down in Salt Lake City last spring and were greeted by thousands in an airport hangar and an overstuffed Delta Center to welcome the new NHL franchise, Utah Hockey Club players have felt right at home.

“We walked in and basically we’re looking around like, ‘What is going on?’” Bjugstad said, smiling. “I couldn’t believe it. So that was how it started and then from there, it was just top-notch. Like seriously, treated like kings. Completely first class.

“This is nothing against Arizona. They have die-hard fans. But it became frustrating as players. We wanted news of what was going to happen and there was a lot of limbo for a long period there. So that was probably the most frustrating part. Players and staff, everyone got through it together and then we come here and it’s just a whole other world for us. And it’s fun for the guys that haven’t seen organizations like this and guys that have been in Arizona for so long or have only played for Arizona to come here, get treated so well and realize this is how it is other places. The amenities are great, the interactions with the Smiths have been huge and the fans are so excited.

“This is proof we just had to move on.”

Delta Center pic.twitter.com/ra0LzA998g

— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) December 11, 2024

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In a single offseason, the Smith Entertainment Group renovated the bowels of Delta Center to give not just the home team a first-class locker room experience that includes a shared coaches room, weight room and trainer’s room with the Utah Jazz, but also the visiting team. NHLers experiencing a road game at Delta Center for the first time have been blown away by the size of the visitors room and the fact they have access to a full gym, hot tub, cold tub and a medical room that’s bigger than many in their home rinks.

They figured out a way to build a temporary practice facility at the Olympic Oval in Kearns, Utah that was used for speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics. They built a practice rink on an island right in the middle of the Oval, buying time for the permanent facility to be built by the fall of 2025 in nearby Sandy. The club quickly scooped up 111 acres of a shopping mall and is essentially gutting a Macy’s that will be transformed into a state-of-the-art facility to house the hockey club’s offices.

The Smiths are also leading a downtown revitalization proposal to reimagine a sports and entertainment district just east of Delta Center.

And over the next two or three offseasons for the Jazz and Utah Hockey Club, Delta Center will be renovated to create a better hockey viewing experience ahead of the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

Currently, there are 11,131 unobstructed seats in the arena and another 5,000 where portions of the ice can’t be seen. Luckily, the building has an enormous, picture-perfect center-ice scoreboard that fans can look at if they can’t see part of the game. Yet despite only counting the 11,131 unobstructed seats as capacity, well more than that have been attending games.

“We’re going to renovate the arena as quickly as we can,” said Chris Armstrong, Utah’s president of hockey operations and not related to Bill. “You start making major changes in the lower bowl and pushing the building out and doing things, we’re going to discover things along the way. Anybody who’s been through a house renovation knows about that.

“But we’re going to try and do it as expeditiously as we can, but we also want to get it right for the fans and during that process make it as minimally disruptive as we can for fans. We will focus on making as many unobstructed seats as we possibly can. We’ve had great demand for the limited view, the single goal view seats this year. People are hungry to get in the building and experience NHL hockey and the environment here at Delta Center. That’s exciting because people are still getting hooked on hockey while they wait for the renovations.”

One idea being played with is a section of seats from the glass to the top of one of the end zones, creating a continuous wall of fans. If that can be achieved, the suites and hospitality areas currently in that end zone would be moved to the other end zone.

Last Wednesday, a few hours before the game, Ryan Smith announced on X that he was giving away tickets for that night’s game against Vancouver, including eight seats in his suite. There was so much demand, Smith quickly got together with SeatGeek and gave away an additional 2,000 single-goal view seats for free. They disappeared in less than an hour.

Pretty neat from an owner who never watches games from inside his snazzy corner suite. Instead, in a tracksuit, he sits along the glass with guests that have included NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, several Jazz players such as former hockey player Lauri Markkanen, former NBA star Dwyane Wade, golfer Tony Finau and music stars Post Malone and Benson Boone.

That game against the Canucks? Utah rallied from a 2-0 deficit in the third period on goals fittingly by captain Clayton Keller and budding young star Dylan Guenther before Bill Armstrong’s big offseason acquisition, Mikhail Sergachev, won it in overtime.

To see and hear Delta Center erupt was another stark reminder these players are no longer playing in a 4,000-seat college rink as they did the previous two years in Tempe, Ariz.

“Listen, when you’re us and you haven’t had that luxury over the last few years to play out in front of a crowd that big and sold out, it’s a beautiful thing,” Bill Armstrong said. “And it gives you that little extra boost. Down 2-nothing in the third, I think the crowd was what put us over the edge.”

Things haven’t just been special off the ice for the Utah Hockey Club.

They are rolling on the ice, too.

Andre Tourigny’s club has won seven games in a row on the road and is 6-0-2 in its past eight, 8-1-3 in its past 12 and pulled within a point of a playoff spot in the Western Conference Sunday with a shootout loss to Anaheim.

This is no longer the Coyotes, where Armstrong’s edict was simply to meet the cap floor, acquire dead-money contracts for essentially retired players to help him do that and gobble up as many draft picks and prospects as possible.

Yet because of the latter, the future in Utah is bright with a core that includes Keller, Guenther, Logan Cooley, Lawson Crouse, Nick Schmaltz and Michael Kesselring (who has soared in the wake of injuries to Sean Durzi and John Marino) and prospects on the horizon such as Maveric Lamoureux, Tij Iginla, Dmitriy Simashev and Daniil But.

“A lot of people start a rebuild, not many people finish it,” Armstrong said. “You don’t want to change the plan depending on what’s going on day-to-day. But this summer, we were able to get some players like Sergachev to help push the process along. You’re getting some pieces that allow you that opportunity to become better and take that next step.

“It’s interesting — you got all the cap space, but that cap space goes quick with a couple of bad decisions. We just try to stay to the timelines and stay to the rebuild to be true to the sense that we want everybody roughly the same ages to some degree, to kind of grow together. The Sergachevs of the world joining the Kellers, the Crouses, and now the Cooleys and Guenthers and that. We added Cup winners — Sergachev, (Kevin) Stenlund, (Ian) Cole, (Robert) Bortuzzo. When we’re going through the rough times and we’re beat up physically and we have some injuries, those guys keep that ship going pretty straight for us.”

Armstrong laughed when asked what he considers the timeline for Utah’s rebuild.

“I was in Montreal last year and I pointed to the banner when somebody asked me the same question,” Armstrong said. “I pointed to their last Cup banner and I go, ‘Thirty years ago you won a Stanley Cup.’ There’s a patience aspect that has to go into this where you have to look at the numbers and you’ve got to do the research. The research is that the quickest team ever to come out of the rebuild was the Penguins and they did it with Sidney Crosby, Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang and they did it within a five-year period. Most rebuilds are somewhere between five to 16 years sometimes to get it done.

“We’re in Year 4 and we’ve been able to, because of COVID and the bad contracts, we were able to accelerate that in the sense of we were able to get a lot more quantity of really good prospects early on. They’re going to filter in the next three to four years. But the good news is the team on the ice right now is a good team and then we’re going to look to add one or two of our prospects to come in over the next few years and you’ll see the team kind of grow and get better.”

But as Armstrong quickly reiterated, the excuse factor of the Coyotes’ yesteryear and their old ownership is gone.

“When you talk about the bull—-, you’re dealing with the negative,” Armstrong said. “Constant stories of negativity. After a while, that gets to players. They want to go to the rink and concentrate on hockey and whether you play bad or well or good, you’re just dealing with hockey. So that makes it easier for the players instead of all the negativity that they couldn’t control that surrounded them.

“So on this end, it’s been really a positive thing and I think our players finally feel like they’re a top-notch NHL franchise. The Smiths have gone above and beyond. The NHL has taken something that was bad and made it good. (Bettman) deserves a lot of credit along with Ryan and Ashley and Chris Armstrong on how they’ve been able to transform it.”

Utah’s eventual nickname and logo are in the final stages and will be announced this offseason, Chris Armstrong said. On Nov. 15, Utah jerseys went on sale and sold out in 24 hours.

Fans lined up at the team store, and Utah set a Delta Center single-day sports event sales record. It beat the previous record — set at its inaugural game against the Chicago Blackhawks on Oct. 8 when other merchandise was available — by 48 percent.

In fact, only one game in NHL regular-season and playoff history had a higher single-game net merchandise sales total: the Golden Knights’ clinching win in Game 5 of the 2023 Stanley Cup Final at T-Mobile Arena on June 23, 2023.

Utah’s closing in on a playoff spot, but you also won’t catch Bill Armstrong jumping for joy and getting ahead of himself just yet.

“It’s been nice for the guys to be rewarded with this win streak,” Armstrong said. “But there’s no nights off in the NHL. I mean, the greatest thing that you can say about our league is the parity. Every night’s a battle. So just when you think you got it mastered, you don’t. Success in the NHL is rented, and rent’s due every day.”

(Photos of Clayton Keller, Delta Center and Ryan Smith: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)

2024 U.S. Open men’s doubles champion Max Purcell has admitted breaking anti-doping rules and has been provisionally suspended from tennis while under investigation.

Purcell has been suspended since December 12, having made the admission and requested to be provisionally suspended December 10. The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) confirmed the suspension December 23, saying that the Australian, 26, breached rules relating to the use of a “prohibited method,” rather than any positive test for a banned substance.

Purcell said in a statement on Instagram: “I have voluntarily accepted a provisional suspension since I unknowingly received an IV infusion of vitamins above the allowable limit of 100ml. Until last week when I received medical records from a clinic showing that the amount of an IV I received was above 100ml, I was fully convinced I had done everything to ensure that I had followed the WADA regulations and methods.

“But the records show that the IV was over the 100ml limit, even though I told the clinic that I was a professional athlete and needed the IV to be under 100ml.”

According to the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA), “infusions or injections of 100 ml or less within a 12-hour period are permitted unless the infused/injected substance is on the Prohibited List.”

A “prohibited method” comes under three possible definitions in the WADA code: blood manipulation, widely referred to as blood doping; chemical and physical manipulation, which extends to all forms of tampering or doctoring either blood or urine samples and also covers intravenous infusions; and gene and cell doping. Purcell’s violation falls under chemical and physical manipulation.

The ITIA has not yet commented on the specifics of Purcell’s violation.

As the suspension is provisional, it is unclear how much tennis Purcell will miss but that time will be credited against any ultimate sanction when the investigation into his case concludes. He was absent from the Australian Open’s list of singles wildcards despite being ranked world No. 105, just outside the cut-off for entries to the main draw.

Doubles entry lists have not yet been released, but Purcell, who won the U.S. Open title in September with compatriot Jordan Thompson and is ranked world No. 12 in doubles was in line to enter his home major. Purcell also won the Wimbledon men’s title with Matt Ebden, another Australian, in 2022.

Purcell is the third major champion in 2024 to be charged with an anti-doping violation. Defending Australian Open champion and world No. 1 Jannik Sinner, who twice tested positive for the banned substance clostebol in March, was found not to be at fault by three independent tribunals convened by the ITIA. Sinner, who also won the U.S. Open title, is awaiting the result of a WADA appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which could see him banned for up to two years.

French Open champion Iga Swiatek, who tested positive for trimetazidine (TMZ) in August, served a one-month ban. 22 days of that ban were covered by her provisional suspension, which saw her miss three tournaments. Swiatek was deemed not to be at significant fault.

(Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

“What Jimmy really loved to do? What he really loved to do was steal. I mean, he actually enjoyed it. Jimmy was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guy in the movies.” — Ray Liotta as Henry Hill

That’s a quote from “Goodfellas,” which premiered in September 1990, when the Oakland A’s were reigning champions and Rickey Henderson was the most electrifying player in baseball. That was his best season, too, and at the start of the next one, he broke Lou Brock’s career record for stolen bases.

Henderson yanked the base from the Coliseum dirt and raised it to the sky. He thanked God, the A’s and the city. He thanked family, fans and managers. Then, with Brock standing beside him, Henderson declared: “Today, I am the greatest of all time.”

That night, 1700 miles away in Texas, Nolan Ryan broke his own record for no-hitters with seven. The irresistible contrast made for a lazy talking point: the humble, stoic Ryan had upstaged the vain, cocky Henderson. Low-hanging fruit at its most sour.

Henderson, who died Friday at age 65, was the bad guy in that movie — and sure, he brought it on himself. He whined about being underpaid. He often referred to himself in the third person. He wore fluorescent green batting gloves. He popped his collar and shimmied on home run trots. He slashed the air after catching fly balls, his glove like Zorro’s blade.

And all of it — the contract stuff notwithstanding — was awesome.

“In my way of playing the game, people have called me a hot dog,” Henderson once said. “But I call it (bringing) some style or entertainment to the people. I enjoy going out there and exciting the fans, because I feel like they come out here to see some excitement.”

Was any player ever more exciting than Rickey Henderson? Was anyone a better entertainer? Certainly, no one outside of the movies loved stealing as much as Henderson or succeeded so grandly at it.

Henderson finished with 1,406 stolen bases. His last came in August 2003, for the Dodgers, off a Colorado pitcher named Cory Vance who was born in June 1979. That was the same month as Henderson’s very first steal, in his major-league debut for the A’s.

In some ways, Henderson was a lot more like Ryan than it seemed. Both played in four decades, into their mid-40s. Henderson led his league in stolen bases 12 times; Ryan led his league in strikeouts 12 times. Henderson is the only player with more than 1,000 steals; Ryan is the only pitcher with more than 5,000 strikeouts. (Henderson, in fact, was strikeout victim No. 5,000.)

But here’s the difference: as freakishly dominant as Ryan was in strikeouts, Henderson was far more prolific in stolen bases. Ryan has 17.2 percent more strikeouts than Randy Johnson, who ranks second. Henderson has 49.8 percent more stolen bases than Brock.

Here’s another way to frame that: Let’s say Henderson’s career had ended in 1993, which would have been a fitting capper. Henderson, then with Toronto, drew a leadoff walk in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 6 of the World Series, causing the Phillies’ Mitch Williams to try a slide-step motion to hold him on. Joe Carter took advantage with a clinching home run.

(In his absorbing biography of Henderson — “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original” — Howard Bryant tells a great story from the following season, after Henderson had re-joined the A’s. On a trip to Toronto, players and staff reminisced about where they were when Carter hit his homer. Henderson shouted from the back of the bus: “I was on second base!”)

Through 1993 Henderson had 1,095 career steals, about 17 percent more than Brock — the same as Ryan’s strikeout edge over Johnson. But Henderson then stuck around for another decade as a speedster for hire.

He bounced back to Oakland, then to San Diego, the Angels, Oakland again, the Mets, Seattle, the Padres again, Boston and Los Angeles. He kept running even when the big leagues stopped calling, swiping 53 more bases for independent teams in Newark and San Diego.

All that speed naturally found its way to the plate. Henderson scored 2,295 runs, another record, just above Ty Cobb, Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. When he set the mark in 2001, with a homer for the Padres, Henderson trotted around the bases – and then slid into home.

“It was feet-first and he was always a head-first guy; that caught us more off-guard than anything,” said Ben Davis, a catcher on that team. “But you never put anything past Rickey. I mean, that year, think about it: he got his 3,000th hit, he got the all-time walks record and he got the all-time runs scored record. The walks record was broken by Barry, but that’s unbelievable, to do all that in one year.”

Henderson was 42 then but still managed 25 stolen bases, the most ever for that age. His single-season record of 130, set in 1982, has never been seriously challenged. Even with new rules to encourage base stealing, last year’s leader, Cincinnati’s Elly De La Cruz, had just 67.

Besides Henderson, only one other modern player, Vince Coleman, has three seasons with 100 steals. After Henderson passed Brock, Coleman, then with the Mets, mused about his own chances. He thought he could do it.

“He knows I’ll be chasing his record, just like I’m chasing all the other records,” Coleman told the (Bridgewater, NJ) Courier-News. “If I stay healthy, I’m gonna average 80, 90, 100 steals a season.”

Coleman never topped 50 steals again. He finished hundreds shy of Henderson, and yet still had a standout career: his total, 752, is sixth all-time. Ultimately, Coleman lacked the on-base component that eludes so many base stealers. Of the 20 players with 500 steals since 1930, more than half had a career OBP under .350.

Henderson’s was .401. Only one modern player with 500 stolen bases, Bonds, reached base more at a higher rate. And while Bonds is easily the game’s greatest living player, Henderson was probably the greatest living Hall of Famer at the time of his death. The only others even in the conversation would have been Mike Schmidt or a pitcher like Johnson, Greg Maddux or Steve Carlton.

It’s jarring now to look at the career leaderboard in wins above replacement. The only living players above Schmidt, who is tied for 24th with Nap Lajoie, are Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, whose careers were tarnished by ties to steroids. The extraordinary volume of high-impact performance is just so hard to achieve.

Henderson did it. He hit from a crouch with a refined approach that would play in any era: a seven-time league leader in walks, he also slammed a half-season’s worth of leadoff homers with a record 81, plus another in the postseason.

That came in Game 4 of the World Series in 1989, the year the A’s brought Henderson back from the Yankees in a midseason trade. That October was his showcase: a .441/.568/.941 slash line with 11 steals in 12 tries. The A’s lost just once on their way to a championship.

Henderson led off the clincher against San Francisco’s Don Robinson. He took two balls. With a thunderous lineup behind him, he could have worked the count. Instead he swung hard at a fastball down the middle, lashing it over the left field fence. The A’s never trailed in that World Series as they romped to a sweep.

It was their last title representing Oakland, Henderson’s hometown. Eventually the team named the Coliseum’s field in his honor, though he never got his own statue — too much permanence, perhaps, for a franchise with a wandering eye.

Now the A’s are gone, off to Las Vegas by way of Sacramento, and Henderson is gone, too. Wednesday will mark 66 years since his birth, on Christmas night 1958 in the backseat of an Oldsmobile on the way to a hospital in Chicago. He was a man on the move from the very start.

Dash away, dash away, dash away all.

(Top photo of Henderson after he broke MLB’s single-season stolen-base record in 1982: Getty Images)