Utah Hockey Club: A view from an obstructed view seat

Let’s be honest. The scene from the obstructed-view seats at the Delta Center for a Utah Hockey Club game isn’t great. Yes, you can see most of the ice. But not being able to see the goal at one end of the rink is, well, irritating. To keep up with the fast-paced, end-to-end action, you have to look back and forth from the ice to the big screen to see the play around the net obscured by the steep bank of bleachers below. By the time you catch up with the puck on the screen, it’s already moving the other direction. And if a goal is scored, you probably missed it from your single-goal view seat.
But it won’t be that way forever.
Smith Entertainment Group, which owns the Utah Hockey Club and the Utah Jazz and the arena they share, has a three-year plan to make the Delta Center fit for hockey and basketball.
Jim Olsen, Utah Jazz president, talked about plans to overhaul the building to accommodate both sports during the Sports Tourism Summit at the Mountain America Expo Center on Tuesday. Chris Armstrong, Utah Hockey Club president of hockey operations and Chris Barney, Smith Entertainment Group president of revenue and commercial strategy, joined Olsen to talk about Utah’s now two major sports franchises, with the NHL team just a few games into its inaugural season.
“To make the Delta Center one of the great hockey venues throughout the league and throughout the country, the only way to do that is really to do a renovation of the entire arena,” Olsen said. “There’s going to be very few areas that aren’t completely redone in one way or another to accomplish that goal.”
At the same time, Olsen said the arena can’t lose the great environment that exists now for Jazz games.
“You don’t find great basketball and hockey venues combined. It’s a great hockey venue and just OK for basketball or a great basketball venue that’s just OK for hockey.
“We really are determined, and I am very confident because of the work we put into it, that we’re going to accomplish both. It’s going to be a great hockey venue where we can fill every seat in the arena with a great sight line and maintain that incredible basketball atmosphere.”
Official capacity for the 2024-25 season is 11,131. On weekends and for games with high demand, the team can choose to make up to 5,000 single-goal view seats available for sale.
The Salt Lake City Council this month approved a participation agreement with SEG for creation of a downtown sports, entertainment, culture and convention district. It also passed a sales tax increase anticipated to generate $1.2 billion over the 30-year life of the agreement, $900 million of which would go to SEG. The company estimates it will spend $525 million to remodel Delta Center and $375 million on the other district improvements.
Olsen said the renovation will take three summers between the basketball and hockey seasons, finishing in 2027.
Despite the partial-view seats for hockey, the team had no problem selling season tickets. It set up a website to start taking deposits as the former Arizona Coyotes arrived in Salt Lake City this past April. Barney recalled being in a conference room in the back of the Jazz practice facility as the site went live.
“If we’re being completely honest, I don’t think any of us had a clue what the response would be,” he said.
Barney said, “It was one of those surreal moments,” where 100 people were on the website, then 300, then 900, then jumping to 3,800 and soon tens of thousands.
“We tend to have at times when we’re moving quick a little bit of a ready, fire, aim mentality, and I think this is a great example of that, but I don’t know if we would have accomplished what we had if we would have had anything different,” he said.
In the end, the club sold more than 34,000 season ticket deposits.
As SEG tracked who placed deposits tickets, only 8% were also Jazz season ticket holders. Also, 63% of the people hadn’t attended an event at the Delta Center within the year.
“Fast forward to Oct. 8 (opening night), we really feel like we were able to curate this brand new audience at the arena and give them an incredible experience and build the fanbase,” Barney said.
A crowd of 16,020 watched the Utah Hockey Club’s first game — a 5-2 win over the Chicago Blackhawks — including 4,889 sitting in single-goal view seats.
While Delta Center will now have 41 nights of Utah HC games a year drawing thousands of people, Armstrong said the arena isn’t the primary place where fans will engage with the team and hockey.
After visiting the Seattle Kraken’s relatively new practice facility, he said the Utah team took away that the “practice facility is actually the No. 1 place that the community is going to interact with your brand on a daily basis.”
Utah practices at the Olympic Oval in Kearns for now, but will move to a new training center under construction in Sandy at the Shops at South Town, which SEG bought. The site will include two ice sheets and team headquarters. The team sees the center as a “community asset” and “anchor” where Utahns, particularly children, can learn about and play hockey as part of its effort to grow the sport in the state.
“They can come to our practice facility every day. Kids can skate on the same ice as their NHL heroes. They can watch us practice there,” Armstrong said. “We’ll have open practices every time we’re there unless we really played poorly and coach doesn’t want anybody in the building.”