Utah’s new National Hockey League team is starting to assemble their list of possible team names ahead of their inaugural (but not expansion) season this fall.
DetroitHockey.Net’s Clark Rasmussen, the king of the trademark search, found two more names possibly trademarked by the group, bringing the total to nine that have been registered thus far:
Utah Blizzard
Utah Fury
Utah HC
Utah Hockey Club
Utah Ice
Utah Mammoth
Utah Outlaws
Utah Venom
Utah Yetis
The club’s co-owner (and also co-owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz), Ryan Smith, told Sportsnet’s 32 Thoughts podcast that he wants to let the fans ultimately decide the final name via a tournament bracket.
“We have six or eight names that seem to be the ones,” he told the podcast. “We’ve engaged Qualtrics to do it from a survey standpoint, grab all the feedback, and run the brackets so it’s right.”
Rasmussen’s post notes that while we currently have nine trademarked names, two of them are effectively one (Utah Hockey Club and Utah HC), which reduces us to eight. Eliminating the teams with no name (it felt good to be out of the rain) reduces us to seven. Both scenarios are within that “six or eight” range Smith set.
Speaking of scenarios, Smith said his “dream scenario” sees overlapped elements between the Jazz uniforms and the new Utah NHL team uniforms.
“If you look at the mountains on the [Jazz] jersey, that breeds a little bit of a colour palette naturally, of fresh ice, blue skies, you see that,” Smith told the podcast. “In a dream scenario, there’s a Venn diagram where you’ve got the Jazz and this team … where things could overlap.”
“You’ve got to leave a little room for teams to get out and do special stuff that’s not going to be part of that diagram, but I think there can be a really cool symmetry, and I don’t think it has to just be like Pittsburgh or everything else where everything’s the exact same colour.”
Smith refers to Pittsburgh’s sports teams, which all use the same colour scheme of black and yellow.
As it stands, I’m not sure I’m a fan of any of the possible names revealed so far. Yetis is okay, I guess? But the Colorado Avalanche have already used that Bigfoot imagery — is that a problem? Utah Blizzard might work, from Smith’s point of view, in that it lends itself easily to that mountain imagery he spoke about, plus the double “Z” can work as a tie-in to the “Jazz.”
We’ll keep an eye out on this, but I suggest you follow Clark over on Twitter/X @detroithockey96 for the latest on this.
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