SALT LAKE CITY — It took until Nov. 13 last season for the Utah Mammoth to get their fourth home win of the season.

This year, it happened on Oct. 21 as part of the opening home stand.

Alternate captains Lawson Crouse and Mikhail Sergachev scored their first goals of the season, and Dylan Guenther got yet another game-winner in overtime for a 4-3 win over the division-leading Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday at the Delta Center.

The win gives Utah a 4-0 start at home this season after dropping three of their first five games at home in the inaugural season. So, what changed in a year?

“We’re a little bit older; we’re more mature,” Sergachev said. “There’s still areas we need to improve, but we’re trying to get it into our mentality that, no matter what, we play the same way. Those best teams that won cups before, that’s how they played. No matter what, they kept the same mentality, same style of play.”

Sergachev included the Avalanche in that group, going so far as to say “we want to be that,” when talking about the 2022 Stanley Cup champions.

“It’s a measuring stick for us,” Sergachev said. “They’re one of the best teams in the league. They’re showing it every year. They’re consistent; their best players are consistent. We want to be that and we want to grow into that. So, obviously, it’s nice to get a win, but it’s got to be on a consistent basis.”

The 27-year-old leader of the blue line not only scored his first goal of the season, but got his first points overall, moving from 0 to 3 on a goal and two assists.

“Six games without a point, that kind of feels like nothing in terms of time, but to me, it felt like forever,” Sergachev said. “Every day coming to the rink knowing that you’re 0 plus 0. I didn’t play bad, you know, I had some chances, but it just takes a toll, mentally too. But it was nice to get a goal.”

POSTGAME

“It didn’t matter if we were up or down, we kept the same mentality… We stayed with it, blocked some shots … I liked our mentality staying with it, no matter what.” @utahmammoth Mikhail Sergachev on the mentality of the group pic.twitter.com/4kHiUXY74m

— Utah Mammoth PR (@UtahMammoth_PR) October 22, 2025

Goaltender Karel Vejmelka gave up goals to Cale Makar, Jack Drury and Martin Necas, but held the second-highest goalscorer in the NHL, Nathan MacKinnon, scoreless, stopping all eight of his shots on the night.

Nick Schmaltz had the other goal for Utah in the win, once again extending his lead at the top of the Utah points leaderboard with 10 through seven games.

The Mammoth improved to 5-2 on the year, with one of those losses coming against the Avalanche, 2-1, in the season opener on the road in Denver.

Utah heads back on the road after completing its opening home stand on Tuesday, with a game in St. Louis on Thursday and the first back-to-back of the season on Saturday and Sunday in Minnesota and Winnipeg.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.