After a mammoth undertaking of buying an NHL team, moving players, coaches and a full staff more than 600 miles and getting it all together in a matter of months before the puck dropped on a new season, it is perhaps a fitting identity that owners Ryan and Ashley Smith chose after rounds and rounds of fan voting.
They unveiled Utah Mammoth as the franchise's permanent, full-time name Wednesday, with a profiled logo of the ice age creature featuring nods to the shape of the state, its mountain range and the same light blue, black and white color scheme that quickly became synonymous with the team in its first season in Salt Lake City.
''Our fans made it very easy for us,'' Ryan Smith said at a news conference at Delta Center celebrating the branding effort's competition after more than 850,000 votes were cast over the past 13 months. ''Every single night we were doing the voting, Mammoth just started running away with it. ... And for us, it was like, ‘That's it.'"
Mammoth replaces the 2024-25 placeholder name Utah Hockey Club, which was also one of the three finalists. Yeti was taken out of consideration when the cooler company bearing that name could not come to a copyright agreement with Utah ownership, and Wasatch — a reference to the state's mountain range — was quickly replaced as an option by Outlaws.
The Mammoth are maintaining the road jerseys with UTAH diagonally down the front. The logo, along with mountains and a hidden ''M'' and more of what Smith called ''Easter eggs,'' also has a curved tusk that forms a ''U.''
Mammoth fossils have been found throughout Utah, including a complete skeleton in Huntington Canyon in 1988. The team said ''Tusks Up'' will be its rallying cry.
''We uncovered a little bit of the mammoth history in this state,'' Smith said. ''It was daunting — of how close and tied and whether it was Lake Bonneville or Fairview, Utah, or Lake Powell and the size of the mammoth and how fast they go, it became like this really cool thing.''
Utah has an exciting summer ahead holding the fourth pick in the draft, the first phase of arena renovations taking place and more than $20 million in salary cap space for general manager Bill Armstrong to make a splash in free agency and trades. With young talent like captain Clayton Keller, budding star forward Logan Cooley, two-time Stanley Cup champion Mikhail Sergachev and emerging goaltender Karel Vejmelka, the Mammoth could contend for a playoff spot as soon as next season.
