It’s a good time to be a Utah Mammoth fan, given the excitement around the franchise. Seventeen months after the Smith Entertainment Group bought the team previously known as the Arizona Coyotes, hockey is more than up and running in Salt Lake City.
The team appears to be heading in the right direction, and with the Utah community getting more and more involved, the franchise’s billionaire owner, Ryan Smith, is taking it all in.
Utah Mammoth Owner Refuses To Follow Dallas Cowboys’ Playbook
There are several ways to run a major U.S. sports franchise, but Smith has clearly done his homework. In a lengthy interview with The Athletic, Smith made it clear that he will not fall into the old traps that have come back to haunt sports franchise owners across the country.
When asked by The Athletic for his thoughts on how he sees himself as a franchise owner, Smith said: “Am I Jerry Jones, where I’m playing GM? Absolutely not.”
However, the billionaire businessman also stressed that he’s not a completely hands-off owner. “Am I hiring people and getting out of the way? Absolutely not. I don’t want to coach the team. I don’t want to play GM. However, I want to know absolutely everything that’s going on at every level. Part of that is also to back our people.”
Smith’s comment on steering clear of being a Jerry Jones-type owner is particularly intriguing, given everything that transpired in Dallas with the Micah Parsons situation.
The Cowboys, the world’s most valuable franchise, backed themselves into a corner while negotiating with All-Pro pass rusher Micah Parsons. When that situation snowballed into all sorts of problems, the Cowboys made a move that put the rest of the league, and their own fans, on notice.
They traded Parsons to the Green Bay Packers in return for what was, by most accounts, a paltry return that did little to solve the problems on the current roster, potentially stealing years away from Dallas’s contention window.
Smith, however, seems to be keenly aware of those pitfalls.
Expecting the Mammoth to be in shape to contend with the likes of the Florida Panthers, Dallas Stars, and Edmonton Oilers just yet would be a tall order. But the franchise is well and truly rebuilding.
The JJ Peterka trade was seen as a warning shot that the Mammoth are on their way up. In fact, they could be less than a few years away from knocking on the door of being a true Stanley Cup contender.
Having talents like Logan Cooley and Caleb Desnoyers certainly helps in the long term. They also boast one of the league’s most exciting goalie prospects in Michael Hrabal.
As things stand, they are on a much better path than Arizona was on, and a few more years of Smith and the Mammoth refusing to take a page out of the Cowboys’ playbook is more than likely to see them knocking on the door of the Stanley Cup Final.