SALT LAKE CITY — Delta Center became the 91st unique venue in which the Rangers have played a regular-season game Thursday night when they beat Utah Hockey Club, 5-3, for the first time. 

There’s always a sort of buzz to a team that’s competing in a new place, and the Blueshirts were no different. 

The NHL era in Utah came quickly thanks to the diligence of owner Ryan Smith, who had been working on getting a team since 2022.

When arena and ownership issues hit a breaking point in Arizona back in April, Smith purchased the Coyotes assets from owner Alex Meruelo for $1.2 billion. 

Now, Utah is the 25th state or district in which the Blueshirts have played. 

In October, the Salt Lake City Council voted unanimously to approve and help fund Smith Entertainment Group’s renovation plans of Delta Center, which was constructed for the NBA Jazz and needs to be fixed for dual use with hockey now on the schedule, too. 

The remodel, which is expected to unfold in three phases and address the 4,000-5,000 seats with obstructed views of the ice, is expected to be completed by the start of the 2027-28 NHL and NBA seasons. 

“It felt pretty good,” Braden Schneider told The Post of his first touch of Delta Center ice. “I think it’s a cool rink. It’s a little different, it’s pretty steep. It looks nice. Everything that’s here with it is really nice. I think it’s a positive review from me.” 

The commitment to making hockey work in Utah is evident in the city’s planned contribution of $900 million, as well as in SEG’s pledge to invest a minimum of $3 billion, according to the Sports Business Journal. 

Hockey, however, already had a presence in Salt Lake City. 

Before Utah H.C., which is supposed to announce a permanent name between the end of this season and the draft, there were the Utah Grizzlies (now of the ECHL) and the Salt Lake Golden Eagles (defunct). 

Peter Laviolette played for the Denver Rangers in 1988-89, which was also the last time the Rangers head coach was in the city.

He got a good laugh remembering how there weren’t many IHL teams around either Denver or Salt Lake City back then. 

“God, we must’ve played them 25 times,” he said with a smile after the Rangers held an optional practice at the Olympic Oval in nearby Kearns. 

The Oval, which was built for indoor speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, was packed on a Wednesday afternoon with youth hockey and curling practice on the opposite side of where the Rangers skated. 

Players had to walk from the Rangers locker room underneath the main level, up a couple flights of stairs and into their designated rink, which was surrounded by a massive speed skating sheet that wrapped around the entire facility. 

The arenas and city may be new to most of the Rangers but not for Laviolette or assistant Michael Peca. 

Peca has fond memories after winning a gold medal with Team Canada in 2002. 

“Practice at the practice arena [felt] good for me because I know the Olympic Games were there,” Artemi Panarin told The Post before the game Thursday. “For me, Olympic Games are something special, and I just enjoy that energy from the arena. Pretty fun.” 

Igor Shesterkin stopped 28 of the 31 shots he faced in his 14th victory of the season. 

Zac Jones was a healthy scratch for the 10th straight game and the 12th time in the last 13. 

The Rangers scored a shorthanded goal for the second straight game, which gave the team seven on the season. That’s good for third in the NHL behind only the Panthers (11) and Lightning (8). 

Gov. Spencer Cox is about to overhaul Utah’s remote work policy for state employees.

But during his monthly PBS Utah news conference Thursday, the governor stopped short of saying whether he’s going to order state government workers to return to the office full time.

“We’re still working on that and we’ll have more to announce on that soon,” Cox said, adding that since the COVID-19 pandemic, the state has “been bringing more and more people back into the office. So we’ll continue to evaluate where it works and where it doesn’t.”

Approximately 40% of state government’s more than 22,400 employees are eligible to work from home but exactly how many do is not being tracked. Last year, many state workers were told they must be in the office at least two days a week.

“Remote work has its place. But so does being together,” the governor said. “That’s another thing that we learned during the pandemic. It’s not healthy to be isolated. We need that feedback, we need that interaction that comes not just from doing your work.”

He said it’s also important “to say ‘hi’ when you go to the water cooler or the restroom, and being able to get in a room together and just be able to talk and look at each other face-to-face. That matters. So those are the things that we’re working through right now.”

Cox, who once called himself “a televangelist for telework,” promised “there will be more to come.”

Before the pandemic, which had both private and public sector employees working from home, Utah had been encouraging what was known as telework for state employees as a way to save money on building or leasing office space.

Cox, who helmed the state’s pilot teleworking program in 2018 as lieutenant governor, said Thursday it “was very successful. It showed remote work can work if it’s done in the right ways. You don’t just send people home with a computer. It’s much more detailed than that.”

The pilot program showed what’s needed is “incredible oversight. You have to have different training. You have to have an area of your house that is set aside specifically for work so you have an actual workspace that had to be approved and compliant,” he said.

When those criteria are met, the governor said “we see actually an increase in productivity.”

But when the pandemic struck in 2020, “we didn’t have those same things in place for the thousands of workers who were working remotely,” he said. Now when it comes to the state’s telework program, the governor said, “parts of it are working. I think parts of it aren’t.”

The prospect of cutting government costs through shared workspaces and “getting rid of some of the leases that are very expensive” remains a priority, Cox said. State agencies are currently reviewing future space needs.

“What we’re trying to do is to figure out, how do we save taxpayer money by using less space and how do we make sure that the employees that are working on behalf of the taxpayers are efficient and productive,” he said, while “giving them as many opportunities as possible.”

The Utah Jazz have the worst home win percentage in the NBA, with just three wins.

The Utah Hockey Club has the worst home win percentage in the NHL, with just six wins.

Well, well. How the NBA’s mighty fortress in Utah has fallen. And, as it turns out now, the NHL’s, too, not that so far it ever really had much of a chance to stand firm.

The Delta Center used to be a favored place — a palace — for the Jazz to play and a dreaded place — a pit — for opposing NBA teams to try to survive, let alone get a win.

Visiting players hated playing there for a whole lot of reasons, foremost among them, they knew they had only a scant shot at victory. They knew it and the Jazz knew it, and the fans knew it. The cinder blocks in the walls and the steel girders in the roof, where the crowd noise of what sounded like a squadron of F-22 fighters taking off ricocheted from every hard surface in the arena, knew it.

Oh, what used to be.

A poll taken by Sports Illustrated among active players in 2008 ranked the Delta Center as “the most intimidating arena in the NBA.”

It had been that way since the early ‘90s, when Larry built the joint.

Maybe you remember, the place was a looney bin. It wasn’t just the building, although the basic structure was intended primarily for basketball, what with fans seated all snug to the floor, courtside and along the end lines, and the hovering seats ascending upward from there. Man, the fans were loud. More than loud, they were rowdy and raucous and … motivated. It was as though all Utahns had their identity wrapped up in every game’s result. If the Jazz won, people around here truly felt better about themselves, about who they were and what they were all about.

The Jazz were them, and they were the Jazz. Many of those fans still show up — out of boredom, out of sympathy, out of self-loathing, but healthy self-esteem nowadays is in the shortest of supply.

This is now, that was then. The entire experience at the Delta Center has flipped.

What once had even ultra-competitive opponents like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant finding themselves swamped in the environment — although for them it often stirred their best talents — for more than a few lesser players, the Delta Center’s force of personality, for lack of a better way of describing it, crushed them.

Yeah, it helped that the Jazz often had stellar teams taking the floor, teams that were, as mentioned, fairly convinced they were going to win even before they left the locker room. I once asked Antoine Carr, as he sat in front of his locker in the minutes before the opening tip what the odds were that the Jazz would triumph that night. He responded with a question of his own: “Where we playing?”

“Right here,” I answered.

“Nuff said,” Big Dawg barked.

And, sure enough, the victorious hounds were released, same as it ever was.

Back in those years, many years, the Jazz finished with home records of 36-5, 33-8, 34-7, 37-4, 38-3. As recently as 2020-21, the Jazz were 31-5 at home. According to Statmuse, the Jazz’s all-time home record is 1,375-657, which, of course, includes some games played outside the Delta Center. But you get the idea.

It’s a place where you can bet on them winning.

Could.

Not anymore.

The Jazz thus far this season are 3-14 at home. The sounds of those jets launching have grown if not silent, a bit quieter. It’s not even the fans’ fault, though. They’re doing what they can, trying to give the Jazz a lift. The fact that the Jazz draw as well as they do given the circumstances is remarkable. The crowd’s energy, or at least its effectiveness, more often than not surpasses what the team offers.

When the midseason juncture approaches, and the Jazz have just a few home wins to show for it, all you can say is, “Tanks,” or “No tanks,” depending on where you stand on the issue of the Jazz not really trying to win, as a means to win much more in the seasons ahead with added draft talent.

The thing is, even without a tanking effort going on, the same home-stumbling phenomenon is happening to the Utah Hockey Club. It shares the Jazz’s dubious designation, just not quite as lousy, with a home mark of 6-10-4.

You can almost see the tears rolling down out of the weeping windows of the Delta Center. The proud competitive chateau has turned into a sorry sagging shack, even as plans for more renovation are already underway.

Hockey gets a pass, considering it is new to the premises. And perhaps the Jazz do, too, since their bosses decided they were brilliant enough to disassemble a playoff team that they saw as not quite good enough — without enough financial flexibility in it — to then out-maneuver everybody else in the NBA to make an eventual move upward.

That doesn’t mean the building has to like it. I’m thinking the place is haunted now. That’s the feeling I get when I walk through the doors. The ghosts of past 50-plus-win seasons are floating hither and thither, making a racket, being chased around and off by sub-.500 spirits.

The specters and spooks of losing will do that. They’re doing it now. And the only exorcism that will save the Delta Center is …

Ownership and management being as smart as they think and thought they were, smart enough to be worthy of the place they call home.