Culture
Utah’s NHL future looks bright after ‘frustrating’ years in Arizona: ‘No excuses anymore’
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
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.
Utah Hockey Club celebrates Mikhail Sergachev’s overtime goal against the Canucks. (Alex Goodlett / Getty Images)
“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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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