Off-Season Review: Utah Hockey Club aiming to be competitive in team’s debut campaign
For the first time since 2011, a team in the National Hockey League relocated.
Welcome to Oilersnation’s summer series called Off-Season Review, in which we’ll take a dive into what’s going on with the other 15 teams in the Western Conference. So far, we’ve looked at all seven Pacific Division teams, as well as all but two teams in the Central Division. In this article, we’ll look at the Utah Hockey Club, the penultimate team in the series.
The Arizona Coyotes/Utah HC 2023-24 Season in a Nutshell
After decades of turmoil in the Arizona desert, the Arizona Coyotes relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah. It doesn’t look like an expansion team will arise in Phoenix anytime soon, but for simplicity’s sake, I will refer to the Utah Hockey Club in the first two sections of this article as “the Arizona Coyotes”.
So how did the Coyotes do in their final season in Arizona? Not great, once again. They finished with a 36-41-5 record for 77 points, 21 points out of the final Wild Card spot. While they weren’t as bad as the bottom-feeding teams, like the San Jose Sharks and the Anaheim Ducks, they were by no means good.
Playing in Mullet Arena, a college stadium with an NHL capacity of just 4,600 fans, the Coyotes missed the postseason for the fourth consecutive season. If you don’t count the weird 2019-20 season where they made it past the qualifying round, the last time they made the postseason was all the way back in the 2012 playoffs, where Mike Smith carried them to a Western Conference Finals appearance. This was the only time they ever made it out of the first round.
