If the Vancouver Canucks could hit the “undo” button on one trade in the last decade or so, it would have to be the one that ultimately landed Dylan Guenther with the Utah Mammoth.

In a draft day trade in 2021, the then-Arizona Coyotes acquired the ninth overall pick from the Canucks, which the Coyotes used to select Guenther.

Five years later, “Gunner” has five goals and 11 points in 10 career games against the Canucks — including a goal and an assist in the Mammoth’s 7-4 win at Rogers Arena on Saturday.

He’s also two goals away from the 40 mark for the season. For context, Brock Boeser leads the Canucks in goals this season with 21.

The only things the Canucks have left from the deal are a pair of mediocre draft picks from flipping Conor Garland to the Columbus Blue Jackets and four more seasons of millions in dead cap space after buying Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s contract out two years later.

But Guenther’s two points on Saturday were only half of what the game’s leading scorer, Clayton Keller, contributed. Among his four points were three goals, lining up his third career hat trick and his first with the Utah franchise.

In true Keller fashion, he shrugged off his success without even cracking a smile.

“It feels good, for sure. Great plays by the guys on all of them, so, yeah, it’s good to score, for sure,” he said.

It was an all-hands-on-deck type of win for the Mammoth, with 13 different players recording points (including five of the six defensemen). Their third win in a row maintains their healthy lead in the wild card race, though they still haven’t officially clinched a playoff spot.

Through two seasons of existence, Utah remains perfect against Vancouver. The Philadelphia Flyers and the Buffalo Sabres are the only other teams that have yet to beat the league’s newest team, though each of them has only seen Utah four times, as opposed to Vancouver’s six.

How deep can you go?

Depth is a trait of virtually every Stanley Cup-winning team. The regular season is a grind and the playoffs are even more intense, so there are always injuries. The best teams find ways to overcome them.

With a few exceptions, the Mammoth have been largely fortunate this season on the injury front — unlike last year, when two of their top four defensemen missed more than half the season. But over the last week or so, guys have started to drop.

It began with Barrett Hayton, who collided with a teammate just seconds into the Mammoth’s March 24 game against the Edmonton Oilers and is now out on a week-to-week basis.

In Thursday’s game against the Seattle Kraken, Jack McBain took an Adam Larsson shot to the leg and is also out week to week. NHL Edge lists Larsson in the 92nd percentile in shot speed, so you can imagine how much that must have stung.

MacKenzie Weegar missed Saturday’s game, too, with what the Mammoth categorized as an “upper-body injury” expected to keep him out on a day-to-day basis.

It isn’t clear what caused Weegar’s injury, though he did take a fairly hard hit from Jacob Melanson with 9:58 on the clock in the third period on Thursday. That said, Weegar did finish that shift and played another three shifts afterwards.

But Utah’s depth guys are coming up big.

Liam O’Brien, who hadn’t played in precisely two months, scored what may have been the prettiest of his 13 career NHL goals Saturday, beating Nikita Tolopilo on a move to the backhand with speed.

“He’s such a great teammate, great guy, and he grinds every single day, so that’s, like, awesome to see,” Keller said of O’Brien.

Nick DeSimone filled Weegar’s spot on the back end, playing his first game since March 10. As always, he played as if he hadn’t missed a game all year.

He was on the ice for two goals against, but neither one was directly his fault — and he made up for it by being present for three Mammoth goals, registering an assist on one of them.

And with the likes of Dmitri Simashev, Kevin Rooney, Daniil But and a number of other capable role players on the outside looking in, the team is well-equipped to handle additional adversity that may come as it pushes for the playoffs.

“It’s not just having depth. It’s having guys you trust,” said Mammoth head coach André Tourigny after the game. “Both of those two guys (O’Brien and DeSimone), I trust them. They play the right way, they’re good pros, they stay ready. (No matter) how long they don’t play, they jump in.”

“We have a deep lineup and anyone that steps in is a great player and someone that knows our systems well and can contribute. O’Brien and DeSimone stepped in tonight and were great for us,” added Keller.

Goal of the game

Fans were treated to a number of beautiful goals on Saturday, but there’s one that stands out above the rest.

Kailer Yamamoto tipped a Logan Cooley shot-pass through his legs and into the net to tie the game early.

Keep in mind that Yamamoto is a guy who spent nearly all of last season in the minors and has watched a lot of games from the press box this year. It takes immense amounts of skill and confidence to pull off a move like that in an NHL game, and Yamamoto has plenty of both.

I said it on X and I’ll repeat it here: As long as players like Yamamoto are on the fringe of NHL rosters, I refuse the notion that expansion over-dilutes the game. More than ever before, the number of elite hockey players far exceeds the amount of NHL roster spots.

Yamamoto and plenty of others in similar positions deserve to be permanent, full-time NHLers with no fear of losing their jobs. Keep expanding.

SALT LAKE CITY — A repeat sex offender who was getting another chance at freedom is back behind bars after a civilian predator hunter group confronted him inside a halfway house in Salt Lake City.

Predator Poachers, the group run by Alex Rosen, baits online predators using “decoy accounts” set up to look like online profiles belonging to minors. They then travel from state to state confronting their “catches,” filming the confrontations to post content online, then calling local law enforcement in the hopes they’ll make an arrest.

At the end of March, Rosen and his team arrived in Utah and filmed confrontations with four men including Chase Quinton, 37, who had recently been granted parole and was living in a Utah Department of Corrections community correctional center, or halfway house.

As the KSL Investigators have reported, predator hunter groups present a unique challenge for law enforcement. Officials never want to encourage civilians getting involved in confronting potentially violent criminals. At the same time, Predator Poachers is regularly credited with stopping would-be sex crimes against children.

Special delivery

“I’ve got a package here for ya,” Rosen is heard in Predator Poachers’ video as Quinton responds to the lobby of the halfway house.

“He came down for his package, and in the lobby I interviewed him for like 15 minutes in hushed tones, and he admitted he was communicating to underage kids online and downloading apps he was not allowed to have on parole,” Rosen told the KSL Investigators.

During the confrontation, corrections officers can be seen walking through the background of the video. At one point, Rosen zooms in on the large Utah Department of Corrections logo on the wall behind Quinton, telling him, “Literally being in the Department of Corrections’ custody, you cannot be texting underage kids.”

After Quinton admitted to sending the messages on camera, Rosen involved a nearby corrections officer who immediately confiscated the parolee’s phone.

“It was, like, ‘We caught him in the halfway house!’ He was messaging two fake decoy accounts he believed were two underage kids,” Rosen told KSL. “And he wanted one of them to sneak out of their house in his mind and meet him.”

‘We would have caught it’

Quinton was returned to custody on a parole violation and is currently at the Salt Lake County Jail.

“He was going on a path that led him right back to where he belonged in this case, and that’s in prison,” said Spencer Turley, deputy executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections.

Turley said the department is grateful it was Predator Poachers — and not real children — on the other end of those messages.

“One of the things that we would ask is that they, rather than just outright confronting the person, is bring it to us first, so that we can then confront them, and we can address them,” said Turley. “Some of that reduces evidentiary challenges when we get to court and prosecutors start looking at prosecuting the case.”

In the video captured by Predator Poachers, Quinton is shown confessing to a corrections officer, “A week and a half ago I downloaded an app. I had gotten high on meth.”

Turley said Quinton had recently passed a drug test and that just days before the incident, corrections officers had searched his phone.

“If he’s out there actively engaging in sexual conversations online, I have no doubt we would have caught it,” said Turley.

Parole history

Quinton was convicted of his first sex offense in 2018. He went to a park with condoms in his coat pocket to meet a 13-year-old girl, but found law enforcement there instead.

After his first release on parole, he was convicted of a similar crime in Idaho in 2022.

The new conviction counted as a parole violation in the initial case, which prompted another stay in Utah’s prison system.

During a hearing in July last year, he tearfully asked Utah’s Board of Pardons and Parole for another chance.

“I do plan on doing better this time,” he said.

(Quinton) was going on a path that led him right back to where he belonged in this case, and that’s in prison.

–Spencer Turley, Utah Department of Corrections

According to a spokesperson for the parole board, Utah’s sentencing guidelines call for a 180-day sentence in response to a person’s first three parole violations. Quinton was most recently paroled in December, which meant the board kept him in custody longer than the standard amount of time after his additional conviction in Idaho.

“Your next hearing or release date is beyond the parole violation guideline because the board finds a public safety exception,” the board’s decision stated. “A public safety exception means the board finds that your conduct has or may present a substantial threat to public safety.”

Quinton spent three additional days in jail as a sanction in January, according to parole board documents.

“After he’d been out about two weeks, we did a phone check, and we found some adult pornography on his phone,” Turley explained.

While the content was not illegal, it did violate his release conditions. After spending a few days in jail, Quinton returned to the halfway house.

“One of the parameters of getting his phone back in that case was that he had to participate in sex offender treatment, and until his therapist felt like he was at a place to be responsible with the phone, we would not give it back to him,” said Turley.

He said the department gave Quinton back his phone about six weeks later, at the direction of his therapist.

What’s next?

“He’s not even the first sex offender we caught that day,” said Rosen.

Quinton is one of four men Rosen and his team confronted in Utah last month. Two of them were already convicted of sex crimes.

According to a police booking affidavit, David Burris was previously convicted of sexual abuse of a child. Rosen confronted him in Brigham City, where police arrested him.

“Utah’s prison system, judges and parole board need to go hard on these people,” said Rosen. “These sex offenders should not be available for us to catch.”

The KSL Investigators are still working to confirm law enforcement records related to the other two men.

Utah’s parole board has jurisdiction over Quinton through 2032 and will ultimately decide what happens to him next. Turley said the Department of Corrections will be recommending he serve additional prison time.

Turley said investigators are also performing forensic analysis on his phone to find out whether there were any real victims involved.

Have you experienced something you think just isn’t right? The KSL Investigators want to help. Submit your tip at investigates@ksl.com or 385-707-6153 so we can get working for you.

Amid the change of Kyle Whittingham stepping down and Morgan Scalley taking over as Utah football’s head coach last December, one question hung in the air: Would quarterback Devon Dampier come back to the program?

On Dec. 18, in the immediate aftermath of Whittingham stepping down, Dampier hinted that he was going to return to Utah.

“Y’all going to see. Y’all going to see, but it is great. I’m very happy to be here. Seriously,” Dampier said with a smile.

Though there were rumblings that Dampier had already signed a deal to stay in Salt Lake City, as time passed without an announcement from the man himself, more and more Ute fans started to wonder if their starting quarterback would return after all.

On Jan. 13, two weeks after Dampier dazzled in a Las Vegas Bowl win over Nebraska, the Utah quarterback posted a video on social media with his face superimposed over Leonardo DiCaprio’s in the famous “Wolf of Wall Street” clip.

“I’m not leaving.”

As Utah’s program underwent significant change — ushering in a new era under Scalley, losing offensive coordinator Jason Beck and five other assistant coaches to Michigan and dealing with departing players in the transfer portal — Dampier’s decision to come back was a stabilizing force for a program in flux.

Make no mistake, Dampier will be rewarded handsomely for staying at Utah, but in an age when the highest dollar almost always wins out in the transfer portal, there were a few other factors that weighed into the quarterback’s decision to return.

Loyalty, finishing what he’s started at Utah and playing in front of the fans at Rice-Eccles Stadium were all elements, but a gesture by Scalley and his coaching staff also made a big impression on Dampier.

“When I had surgery, I came back and our whole entire staff was waiting for me to get off the plane. That meant a lot to me,” Dampier told the Deseret News.

What sealed the deal for Dampier was a conversation with Scalley.

“Just us having this conversation about what he wanted out of me and just his background and my background, we just got on the same page and I love what he said. I love what I felt and I’m sticking to it,” Dampier said.

Despite Scalley being the defensive coordinator at the time, he was the person Dampier talked to the most during his initial recruiting visit in 2025. When Whittingham went to Michigan, there was no hesitation from Dampier to put his full trust in Scalley.

“For him to step into the head coaching job, I had full belief in it. No question. I think he’s worked hard to get to this position, and just as time goes on, it keeps reminding me that I picked the right decision just where things have been so far and I’m loving it,” Dampier said.

While this fall will be Scalley’s first full season as head coach, Dampier already got a taste of what he will be like at the helm.

The original plan was for Whittingham to cap off his Utah career in the Las Vegas Bowl, but when Michigan courted him for its open job and Whittingham accepted, that plan was scrapped.

Instead, Scalley abruptly took over as head coach of his alma mater just days ahead of the New Year’s Eve bowl game. Dampier described the time period of losing Whittingham and Beck as “a lot emotionally,” but as Scalley took the reins, the players rallied around him.

“Something that we live by at Utah is no one’s bigger than the team,” Dampier said. “No one’s bigger than the program, so when you lose one person, man, there’s so many other people in the building, we worked so hard to get to this point that one person doesn’t control our destiny.”

“So just sticking to that, sticking to our culture, and I mean, Scalley came with so much energy. It kind of lightened us up as players just to feel that energy going into a game and it all worked out obviously.”

It was as good of a head coaching debut as Scalley and the Utes could have asked for. Dampier threw for 310 yards and two touchdowns and rushed for 148 yards and three scores and was named the MVP of the Las Vegas Bowl and wore a huge chain with a Utah logo on it postgame.

The next day, Beck left for Michigan, along with five other coaches.

‘He’s going to be able to put me in the best situation every play’

Scalley wasted no time and quickly went to work building his staff, and a lot was on the line as he selected Utah’s new offensive coordinator.

Beck was the only offensive coordinator Dampier had known in college, and the pairing was highly successful. Dampier had excellent command of the offense, and in turn, Beck entrusted him with a lot of control.

In his first season with Utah after making the jump with Beck from New Mexico in 2025, Dampier threw for 2,490 yards and 24 touchdowns with five interceptions on 63.75% accuracy. He answered the two biggest knocks on him from 2024, improving his completion percentage while lowering his turnovers.

Utah went 11-2 including the bowl win, and Dampier helped guide the Utes to a new school rushing record, contributing 835 rushing yards and 10 touchdowns.

All of that production came while Dampier was fighting through injury through much of the year.

Dampier’s signature in the 2025 season came in a dramatic comeback win over Kansas State. On a night when Utah’s defense could not get a stop for much of the game, Dampier put the team on his back.

First, he threw a 20-yard touchdown to Larry Simmons to get Utah within three points, then led a two-minute drill that featured a 59-yard run from him on fourth-and-1 to set up a touchdown run from him to take the lead.

“That last score, it was surreal,” Whittingham said postgame. “It was just a moment that, like I said, you can’t even dream it up.”

Certainly, Dampier wasn’t perfect in 2025, but he elevated Utah’s offense and quarterback play — something sorely needed after the 2023 and 2024 seasons — and he also made an impact on the team with his leadership, often taking his teammates out to eat on his dime.

It’s no surprise that Dampier was named to the leadership council this spring, and he should be a captain for the Utes in the fall.

With Beck in Ann Arbor, Scalley needed to nail the offensive coordinator hire. Scalley, who has kept a running list of possible candidates for the last decade, turned to Utah State offensive coordinator Kevin McGiven.

Led by former Ute quarterback Bryson Barnes in 2025, the Aggies scored 30.9 points per game (No. 36 in the country) and averaged 409.5 yards per game (No. 39 in the country), and that’s with an offensive line that didn’t play up to par, to put it mildly, during most of the season.

At Utah State, McGiven utilized Barnes in the run-pass option to success, with the former Ute throwing for 2,803 yards and 18 touchdowns with five interceptions on 59.3% accuracy and rushing for 740 yards and 10 scores.

Utah State’s offense was explosive, a word multiple Utah players have used this spring when describing what it’s like to play in McGiven’s system.

One selling point for McGiven is that he has a lot of similar offensive concepts as Beck, and that should make the transition easier for Dampier. McGiven has also been willing to adopt the offensive language that the Utes used under Beck to help ease the transition.

McGiven has proved that he can tailor an offense to best utilize each team’s unique skillset, and that’s something that resonated with Dampier.

“You definitely don’t want to play under anyone that doesn’t utilize your skillsets,” Dampier said. “Coach McGiven made it an emphasis that he loves my skillset. He loves what I do.

“He’s going to be able to put me in the best situation every play, … he trusts me, gives me the freedom to do what I want to do every play.”

That trust is important for Dampier, and it’s stood out since his first meeting with Utah’s new OC.

“To have that, to hear that from the beginning, not even when we got to meet for a long time, it’s a different type of feeling that I got of trust and belief that he already had in me,” Dampier said.

“So every day we’re out here, it’s showing up more and more of his faith in me and how much we’re getting on the same page and we’re starting to learn what each other is thinking.”

When he met with Dampier, McGiven pointed to his track record of developing quarterbacks and laid out where the senior signal caller needs to improve in order to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL.

“It’s a goal of his to go to the NFL and so, OK, how do we need to develop you to get you to the next level?” McGiven said. “We need to get you more in tune with protection. We need to get you more in tune with certain types of reads, with certain types of concepts so that you can become more of a complete player.”

So far this spring, McGiven has emphasized the importance of film for Dampier and has coached him on decision making and being a smarter player.

“Developing the total quarterback, and I think the biggest thing with their development, probably with the system and schematics of the system, is just developing their decision making, developing their processes,” McGiven said.

“Reads, going from maybe where he’s got an object receiver, it’s like ‘throw to this guy’, and then all of a sudden you’re going through a full-field progression with certain concepts just because of what the system requires you to do.”

‘Just extra work and a lot of conversations’

Along with learning a new offensive system, Dampier is tasked with building chemistry with a number of new starters, beginning with the offensive line.

The Utes return veteran linemen with experience — Keith Olson (295 snaps last year), Alex Harrison (143 snaps) and Zereoue Williams (156 snaps) — and Solatoa Moea’i (335 snaps at “Y” tight end), but there are new faces such as five-star freshman tackle Kelvin Obot and Montana State transfer Cedric Jefferson.

All in all, it will be a completely new group of starters protecting Dampier.

“Obviously with the O-line as well, just me being involved in pass protection and things like that now, just having that authority, it feels great. I feel like I’m being tested as a leader and I’m embracing it,” Dampier said.

Dampier also has a lot of new pass-catchers — Utah State transfer Braden Pegan (926 receiving yards last year) and San Jose State transfer Kyri Shoels (768 yards) chief among them.

The work to build chemistry between Dampier and his new targets began in the winter and is continuing through the spring.

“Just extra work and a lot of conversations. We kind of have an unsaid rule where if a receiver comes up to me and says something, I’m going to listen to what they say and I’m going to respect what they say, and same way for them,” Dampier said.

“If I say something to them, they’re going to take it and we all know we’re having these conversations to get better. I think that puts us a step closer and closer to the same page on different situations the defense gives us.”

As Scalley heads into his inaugural season as head coach, a lot is riding on the performance of Dampier.

Last season showed that Utah’s offense can be dynamic with him in charge. With the return of Dampier, fellow quarterback Byrd Ficklin, running back Wayshawn Parker and the additions of Pegan and Shoels, there is a high ceiling on offense, but much of it will come down to offensive line and quarterback play.

As Scalley — who has been on the defensive side of the ball for his entire coaching career — shifts to command the entire team, he is focusing in on how to help Dampier become the best version of himself.

“He obviously wants me to get better as a passer, better as a decision maker, learn how to lead an offense fully, having the ability to be engaged with the O-line protections and just all of that,” Dampier said.

“He’s challenging me. He’s making me better. He’s preparing me the right way for the NFL and that’s all I want. The next goal is to get to the NFL, and with my senior year coming up, that’s a huge priority.”