The Utah Hockey Club’s last two regulation losses have now come at the hands of the Dallas Stars following Monday night’s 3-2 loss at home.

An insufficient effort in the second period was Utah HC’s demise. Outside of that, it was as evenly matched as any game.

“I think that second period’s a learning lesson, honestly,” said Utah center Barrett Hayton. “I thought we did a great job in the first period. We were urgent, we were intense, we were on the ball, playing the right way. You just can’t afford those lapses against good teams, and that’s what our second period was.”

A late push from Utah yielded some close calls, but sports fans know “close” doesn’t cut it.

Utah Hockey for dummies

Hayton seems to have found his scoring touch once again.

Until this week, the 24-year-old who centers Utah’s top line hadn’t scored since Oct. 30. Now, he has a pair of goals in as many games. It’s his second time scoring in bunches this year, as he scored in each of the team’s first three games and again in its fifth game.

He told the media after the game Monday that there’s not much rhyme or reason to his streaks.

“I think you’ll score and produce when you’re playing well and playing the right way,” he said. “It all comes full circle like that, so I don’t know. It’s just coincidence.”

Regardless of whether the puck goes in the net or not, Hayton has played an immaculate defensive game this year, which has opened his linemates up for offensive success.

Clayton Keller, who plays on Hayton’s left wing, has scored more than a point per game this year. Nick Schmaltz, his other winger, is just below a point per game.

Interesting note: There’s a discrepancy as to how many points Hayton now has in his career. The team is celebrating his goal as his 100th point, but NHL.com says it’s only his 99th, with the same number of games played, goals and assists.

HockeyDB and most of the other sites agree that it’s number 100. I’m not good enough at math to figure out who’s right. Someone add it up and let me know in the comments.

Utah Hockey for casual fans

Although Utah HC managed just 26 shots Monday, Stars goaltender Casey DeSmith was the story of the game. He plays at the top of his crease, which is especially effective when facing shots from medium and close distances. It earned him the honor of first star of the game.

Time and time again, Utah would create plenty of open space, make a great play and put a solid shot on net, only to have it go straight to the crest of DeSmith’s jersey.

“There weren’t many holes on him,” said Utah center Nick Bjugstad. “There were some good chances on our end, but I still feel like traffic and making it a little harder on him would have been beneficial for us.”

Utah Hockey for nerds

The fatigue of a back-to-back affects teams more than we probably think it does. In this, the second game in as many nights for Utah HC, they got much-needed energy from the third line: Bjugstad, Lawson Crouse and Matias Maccelli.

All night long, that line created chances out of thin air. They seemed to have the chemistry together that earned them all the best or second-best point totals of their careers last year.

One example came midway through the first period Monday. Bjugstad was streaking down the left wing but was forced to the outside by the Stars’ defender.

Rather than trying to beat him with speed, Bjugstad threw on the brakes and sent a spinning backhand pass straight to the stick of Crouse.

DeSmith matched him with a perfectly positioned save, but the play gave Utah a jolt of energy.

Then on the first shift of the second period, they had a similar high-energy rush. It was not by coincidence that Utah head coach Andre Tourigny selected his highest-paced line to set the tone for the second.

These are the kinds of things that third lines are typically responsible for, in addition to chipping in a goal once every two or three games. They’re really struggling to do that second part, but they showed on Monday that they can do the first thing.

“When you’re not scoring as a line, you try to figure out what to do,” Bjugstad said. “For us, it’s just simplifying.”

What’s next?

There will be three silent nights for Utah HC — and the rest of the NHL — before getting back into action on Friday as they host the Colorado Avalanche.

It’s the third and final match this season between the two teams. They’re both 1-1-0 against each other so the season series is on the line.

It’s a big game in the sense that both teams are competing for one of the same five playoff spots, so every point matters. It’s a good chance for one team to gain the edge over the other.

Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon is as hot as ever right now, with 16 points in his last seven games. With that in mind, it shouldn’t surprise you that he has a five-point lead in the NHL points race.

The game starts at 7:30 p.m. It will be broadcast nationally, meaning it won’t be available on the normal channels. Instead, it’s on ESPN2.

One of the gems of Utah’s incoming recruiting class is now heading south.

Four-star edge rusher Hunter Clegg flipped his commitment from Utah to BYU after returning home from his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission this week.

The American Fork product was a top-three player in the state coming out of high school. He was originally part of the 2023 recruiting class — with highly touted players like four-stars Jackson Bowers and Walker Lyons.

BYU made a strong push to sign Clegg a few years ago. In the summer of 2022, head coach Kalani Sitake hosted Clegg as part of BYU’s most high-profile recruiting weekend of the cycle. BYU had Clegg, Bowers, Lyons and offensive lineman Ethan Thomason on campus at the same time. With the collection of four-stars in Provo, the coaching staff pitched that group as cornerstone pieces of BYU’s early Big 12 era. Sitake had one-on-one meetings with all of them. The weekend included photoshoots in the mountains, a trip to Deer Lake and Top Golf.

“It definitely felt like this was an important weekend for the program,” Thomason told The Salt Lake Tribune at the time. “They didn’t go over the top to where it is unrealistic. But you could feel it was really important.”

After that weekend, Thomason and Bowers both committed to BYU. But Clegg and Lyons went elsewhere.

Lyons landed at USC — where he played 10 games for Lincoln Riley last season. Utah also heavily recruited Lyons and the program was surprised he did not come to Salt Lake.

Clegg went on a mission, but oscillated between commitments. He originally pledged to go to Stanford, but backed off after a coaching change. He then announced he’d go to Utah.

Now, he has signed with the Cougars.

Clegg’s addition is important for two reasons. For one, edge rusher is a position of need for the Cougars.

Defensive coordinator Jay Hill has been looking for a pass rusher who can generate sacks. In the last two years, most of BYU’s pass rush has come from the linebacker position with Harrison Taggart and Isaiah Glasker. Getting to the quarterback with a four-man rush is a critical part of Hill’s scheme, he said.

But perhaps more importantly, Clegg flipping from Utah continues a trend of BYU going after in-state recruits already pledged to the Utes.

In the last cycle, Hill put pressure on the state’s No. 3 player, Faletau Satuala, to flip from Salt Lake to Provo. He was able to sign Satuala at the last second.

Part of Hill’s pitch, Satuala and other recruits indicated, was stability. Kyle Whittingham’s potential retirement played a factor, recruits said, with BYU making in-roads with Utah’s recruits.

“I think [stability] is important,” 2025 recruit Taani Makasini said. Makasini was recruited by both BYU and Utah, but signed with the Cougars in this class.

“I don’t want to go somewhere and the person that recruited me isn’t there anymore. I’m going there to learn from him. I’m not going there to learn from whoever they’re gonna hire next,” Makasini said.

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.