Hockey assets from Arizona, a home in Salt Lake City and a jersey that just said Utah.

The Utah club was put together in a matter of months. ESPN reported on 18 April 2024 that the NHL was moving the team then known as the Arizona Coyotes to Utah to start play as a new franchise, with Ryan and Ashley Smith of Smith Entertainment Group, owners of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, taking over the players, draft picks and hockey operations department. English Wikipedia says the NHL Board of Governors created the franchise on 18 April 2024 and that the Smiths acquired the Coyotes’ hockey assets in place of an expansion draft. The new team would play at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, the Smith-owned arena that is also home to the Jazz, ESPN said.

The identity did not travel with the players. ESPN and the Associated Press both reported on 18 April 2024 that the former owner, Alex Meruelo, kept the Coyotes’ name, logo and trademarks, and ESPN said the Coyotes would be treated as an inactive franchise whose history and archives stayed with him. The Coyotes’ history belongs to that franchise, not to the Utah club.

That left Utah to build a brand from nothing. In the AP report, Ryan Smith said the club would “start with Utah on the jersey” and work out the logo later, describing a permanent name as “a one-way door” that had to be done once. ESPN reported that Smith Entertainment Group was working with a branding agency and asking the community for suggestions. Wikipedia says Smith confirmed on 18 April 2024 that the team would carry the state’s name rather than the city’s, and on 22 April said the identity would be chosen by fans through online polls run on Qualtrics, the software company he co-founded. On 8 May the club said it would open its season simply as “Utah,” and on 13 June 2024 it announced it would be known for the 2024–25 season as the Utah Hockey Club. Fans later took up the nickname “Clubbers” from that interim name.

A roundel for the interim season, then a mammoth with mountains on its head.

The interim look set the colours that have stayed. Wikipedia says the Utah Hockey Club’s primary logo, released on 13 June 2024, was a roundel with a “Utah” wordmark in the centre ringed by the words “Hockey Club,” in a palette the club named mountain blue, rock black and salt white. A secondary logo set a “Utah Hockey Club” wordmark over an outline of the state. The home jersey was black with “UTAH” running diagonally across the front, inaugural-season patches on both shoulders and blue and white striping; the road jersey was white with black and blue stripes.

The permanent name came after a long public process. Wikipedia says early polls offered a list of candidate names, and that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused applications for “Utah Yeti” and “Utah Yetis” in January 2025 because of the cooler maker Yeti Holdings. The final round, held at home games in early 2025, offered Utah Hockey Club, Utah Mammoth and Utah Wasatch, with Wasatch replaced a day later by Utah Outlaws. The Associated Press reported on 7 May 2025 that the Smiths unveiled Utah Mammoth as the permanent name at a news conference at the Delta Center that day, after rounds of fan voting. Ryan Smith said the fans had made it easy, because Mammoth pulled ahead every night the voting ran.

The Deseret News reporter Brogan Houston wrote on 7 May 2025 that the name is deliberately singular, Mammoth rather than Mammoths, which the team said stands for the state moving forward as one. The owners said in a statement that “the community chose the Utah Mammoth brand.” Houston noted that mammoth bones have been found in Utah, and the AP added that mammoth fossils have turned up across the state, including a complete skeleton found in Huntington Canyon in 1988. Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Colorado Mammoth lacrosse team, supported the use of the name, Houston reported.

Design and documentation.

When a new club needs a name, the choice is sometimes handed partly to the public. A shortlist of candidates is published, supporters vote or submit ideas, and the final pick is announced at an event built for the reveal. Some clubs also play a first season under a placeholder: a city name with a plain word such as “club” or “team” after it, worn on a simple interim crest while the permanent identity is still being drawn. That gap gives designers time to test colours, wordmarks and secondary marks before the full set is fixed.

Military and historical references are another long-running source for sports marks. Flags, stars, period uniforms, cannons and regional history can give a crest a story that points to the place rather than to the game itself, and the details of those references often reappear in alternate jerseys and shoulder patches. Arenas add a further layer. A horn, a siren, a cannon blast or a particular song after a goal can become as recognisable as any logo, and those rituals are often written into how a club presents itself on match nights, in broadcasts and on merchandise.

Hidden letters, a tusk that makes a U and a typeface named after the team.

The Mammoth logo is built from several Utah references at once. Houston wrote that the home-jersey logo combines a mountain outline, a mark in the shape of the state, an uppercase “M” for Mammoth and a U-shaped tusk. Wikipedia calls it a “Mountain Mammoth” whose head is topped by peaks referring to the Wasatch Mountains, with one of the mountains drawn to resemble the borders of Utah. The AP described the profiled ice-age animal as carrying nods to the state’s shape and mountain range in the same light blue, black and white that the team wore in its interim season, and quoted Ryan Smith on the logo’s hidden “M” and other “Easter eggs.” An additional mark sets a “U” with a mammoth tusk sweeping across it.

The jerseys changed less than the name. Houston reported that the road jersey keeps U-T-A-H descending down the front in a staircase, as in the inaugural year, while the home jersey swaps the wordmark for the new primary logo and adds a shoulder logo in the shape of the state, with “Utah” underlined by a hockey stick. The road shoulders carry the mammoth logo. Striping and colours stay as they were. Both jerseys carry the words “Est. 2024” inside the back of the collar.

The lettering is custom. Houston wrote that the team calls its new typeface “Mammoth Sans,” used for the wordmark and for names and numbers, and that its “A” and “H” have angled crossbars as a nod to the inaugural-season logos.

The club adopted “Tusks Up” as its rallying cry, a phrase that had spread among fans of the name online, the AP and the Deseret News reported. During the interim season the Utah Jazz mascot, Jazz Bear, filled in at hockey games, according to Wikipedia, which says the permanent mascot, a blue woolly mammoth named Tusky, was introduced on 15 October 2025 before the club’s opening home game under the Mammoth name. Ryan and Ashley Smith have owned the club since its creation in 2024.

For a design guide, the Utah Mammoth shows how a new team can use an interim year as a public test, settling its colours and road jersey before the name, and then packing state outlines, mountains and initials into a single animal. Compare the NHL, the Utah Jazz, who share the Smiths’ ownership and the Delta Center, and the Minnesota Wild, another club that named itself after a public shortlist. For this guide we use mountain blue, rock black and salt white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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