The Utah Mammoth skate onto the ice at T-Mobile Arena at 10 p.m. Eastern on Sunday for the first playoff game in franchise history. The opponent is the Vegas Golden Knights, the Pacific Division champions, who have been to the Stanley Cup Final twice and won it once since they entered the league in 2017. [1] Utah earned the first wild card in the Western Conference by beating the Nashville Predators 4-1 on April 9 at Delta Center, on the same night the Anaheim Ducks beat the San Jose Sharks to complete the math that put the Mammoth in. [2]

The franchise is eighteen months old. The Arizona Coyotes' hockey assets were sold to the Smith Entertainment Group on April 18, 2024, exactly two years to the day before Sunday's Game One. The first season, as the Utah Hockey Club, was played in a temporary building. The rebrand to Mammoth and the move to Delta Center came last summer. Now the second season ends in the playoffs. The post-expansion list of teams to make the playoffs in each of their first two years is short — the Vegas Golden Knights, who also went two-for-two beginning in 2017-18; the Seattle Kraken, who did it in 2022-23; and, per the NHL's own bookkeeping, the Mammoth. [3]

Clayton Keller, the captain, led Utah with 88 points (26 goals, 62 assists) in 82 games. [1] NHL.com noted after the clinching game that Keller is just the third American in the modern era — since 1943-44 — to captain a franchise to its first-ever Stanley Cup Playoffs berth. The other two were Rod Langway in Washington in 1982-83 and Dave Christian in Winnipeg in 1981-82. Nick Schmaltz had 74 points. Dylan Guenther scored his fortieth goal on April 5. Karel Vejmelka, the goaltender, had two shutouts in the regular season, including a 28-save, 4-0 shutout of these Golden Knights in Las Vegas on March 19 that the Mammoth will remember and that Vegas will not. [4]

The Golden Knights are not the Vegas Golden Knights of previous postseasons. They fired Bruce Cassidy on March 29 — the coach who raised the Cup in 2023 — and replaced him with John Tortorella, who went 7-1 across the regular season's final eight games and inherited a roster that had added Tomas Hertl, Pavel Dorofeyev, and Rasmus Andersson at the deadline. Jack Eichel missed 22 games with an injury but returned with 26 points in 22 games. Carter Hart took over the net from Adin Hill down the stretch. The consensus previews give Vegas the series, noting Utah's inexperience and Vegas's twelve prior playoff series wins. [5] The consensus previews might still be right.

What the consensus does not address is what the series is actually about. The Mammoth are not the Arizona Coyotes re-branded; they are a different organization playing different hockey in a different market that has, so far, treated the team with the kind of attention that a professional sports franchise needs and that Arizona could not sustain. Single-game tickets for the home games in this series went on sale April 10 and did not last the weekend. Delta Center will fill. The Deseret News has been running roster and tickets coverage since the Wednesday night the Pacific Division was settled. [4]

None of that is guaranteed to translate to a playoff result. The Mammoth have not won a playoff series. The Mammoth have not played a playoff game. The Golden Knights have played a lot of them and know what the ice feels like in a series that goes seven. What the Mammoth have is the regular season they just finished: third-most regulation wins in the West, fourth-highest goal differential, a power play running at 20 percent, a penalty kill at 78. They have a franchise goaltender in Vejmelka, a captain in Keller who wanted the letter and has earned it, and a city that did not have an NHL team when Keller was drafted and now has one whose logo is on the sweaters hanging in every sports bar within a mile of Delta Center. Sunday, 10 p.m. Eastern. The first playoff game. Everything about Utah hockey, so far, has arrived on schedule.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos