The owners of the NHL’s Utah Hockey Club and NBA’s Jazz are beginning a massive renovation of their downtown Salt Lake City Arena that will eventually increase hockey capacity to roughly 17,000 and basketball to nearly 19,000 fans.
Smith Entertainment Group announced its plan Wednesday after a meeting of the Salt Lake City Council earlier in the week.
Officials said the initial stage of renovations this summer should boost the number of full-ice view seats by 1,400: 1,000 new ones and upgrading 400 that had a sightline of just one end of the rink in the team's first season in the city.
“Just in Year 1 (post-renovations) we’re going to see a great improvement for the lower-bowl capacity for hockey,” Jazz president Jim Olson said on a video call with reporters.
To make room for a new retractable seating system and install a new ice floor slab, the floor is getting raised 2 feet and lengthening the arena bowl by roughly 12 feet at each end.
“(Delta Center) was built solely for basketball,” Olson said. “When you come and plop the size of an ice sheet in that venue with those sightlines, the geometry just doesn’t work, and so that’s where you come up with the riser-system configuration. You come up with raising the floor 2 feet. We are absolutely protecting the basketball experience but then also creating a great hockey experience where all the seats can see all the ice."
The plan is for renovations at the building that opened in 1991 to take place over the next three summers.
The NHL team, which was called the Utah Hockey Club as a placeholder after Ryan and Ashley Smith bought the Arizona Coyotes and moved them to Salt Lake City, is expected to have a full-time name before next season. Its YouTube channel showed as the Utah Mammoth for a brief time Tuesday night.
Mammoth, Outlaws and Utah Hockey Club are the finalists.
“Progress continues on exploring all three of the name options that were chosen as finalists by our fans,” SEG executive Mike Maughan said. “We’re fully on track to announce a permanent name and identity ahead of the ’25-26 NHL season and look forward to sharing that with our fans when we do.”
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AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
Stephen Whyno, The Associated Press
