I feel for the Arizona fans. I really do. But as much as I roll my eyes at Ryan Smith sometimes as a Jazz fan, it's pretty fun to see him care so much about the Mammoth and watch them react so positively in turn.
The article is paywalled, sadly.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6783823/2025/11/06/utah-mammoth-nhl-standings-playoffs/
6 comments
Yeah. Alex Murelo shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a professional team of any kind for the rest of his life. Hope someone can free Tuscon from him.
Yeah… Shots fired.
GMBA is a class act. For him to say something like this means something.
Muerlo was a piece of crap who tried to get his son to do something, so he bought him an NHL team, which his kid promptly screwed up to get his dumb sweatshirt fashion line to work.
I’m glad for Smith. He’s the kind of owner you want to be involved with and passionate about this team. They’re gonna be good for a while.
AZ’s loss is Utah’s gain.
Me personally? I’m following the boys… they’re too good to switch to another team, so I’m in from the ground floor. Tusks up!
Four years before the Utah Mammoth became an overnight success story, Bill Armstrong found himself managing the NHL’s worst team.
Do you want to talk about bleak?
That group was outscored 56-22 during a crash-and-burn 1-12-1 start to the 2021-22 season. Amid a raging tire fire, the only signs of hope — undetectable to those outside the organization — came from a draft class from a couple of months earlier. It was impossible to know at the time, though, that Armstrong and his scouting staff had mined at least four bona fide NHL players, including Dylan Guenther, in that draft.
Fast forward to where the Mammoth are today — hovering near the top of the league standings with a 9-5-0 record despite navigating a road-heavy schedule — and there’s just about no resemblance to what the Arizona Coyotes were then. But they are clear beneficiaries of an aggressive rebuild that started in the desert and appears to be delivering results ahead of schedule as the team embarks on Year 2 in Utah.
“We’ve never jumped off the plan,” Armstrong told *The Athletic* this week. “We’re right where we’re supposed to be.”
Not only did the Mammoth begin the season with a new identity after rolling out their team branding in the spring, but they set a clear goal: making the playoffs. The organization hasn’t accomplished that at the end of an 82-game regular season since 2012.
Of course, they’re effectively a brand-new organization following the April 2024 relocation to Salt Lake City, where they’ve found strong support from owners Ryan and Ashley Smith and been provided with the kind of facilities they could once only dream of.
“We have a TV set in the video room where the players meet every morning that is probably worth more than our entire facility was in Arizona,” said Armstrong.[](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6643923/2025/09/23/utah-mammoth-jazz-ryan-smith-nhl-nba/)
It’s proven to be an ideal setting for the fruits of the rebuild to blossom.
The roster-building strategy that Armstrong’s staff embarked on in 2021 may not have been revolutionary, but it also carried no guarantee of success. As Armstrong puts it: “We had a plan to gut the team and grab assets and then draft well, build a good scouting staff, and go to work.” They had to take their lumps in the process and remain resolute amid some bleak stretches of play — something, ironically, that might have been aided by the penny-pinching ways of the previous ownership group in Arizona, which was never going to abruptly alter course by trying to fast-track things with splashy free-agent signings while playing out of a college rink.
While the Mammoth’s strong start this season is being driven by some Coyotes holdovers, including captain Clayton Keller, it’s also come with 20-year-old Dmitry Simashev skating alongside Mikhail Sergachev at times on the top defense pairing. The team’s second line is entirely a product of the rebuild — Logan Cooley between J.J. Peterka and Guenther — and each of those players is now under contract through at least 2029-30.
The Mammoth made a pretty good account of themselves last season, riding a 17-9-4 finish to an 89-point campaign, but they arrived at work in September ready to raise the ceiling again.
Here’s the [article](https://archive.is/S1b4Z) without the paywall
The best part of the article imo:
*Armstrong said he’ll likely take an aggressive approach ahead of this season’s March 7 trade deadline, trying to add more pieces to give his team the best chance possible to push for the playoffs.*
*Nods*
Stop Bill, we’re already dead.