The chase is on: 2023 sees the launch of Utah MLB and NHL pursuits

Back in 1979, Utah joined the ranks of professional sports’ hosts when the upstart New Orleans Jazz moved to the Beehive State just a few years after the team entered the NBA as an expansion franchise.

Just over a quarter of a century later, Real Salt Lake joined Major League Soccer, calling Rice-Eccles Stadium its home pitch until the purpose-built Rio Tinto Stadium in Sandy opened for business in 2008. A year later, the scrappy RSL club won its first (and so far, only) league championship, knocking off the Los Angeles Galaxy to snag the 2009 MLS Cup.

Both franchises have proven out that even in a Utah market that was once widely deemed too small to support even a single pro-level team, Utahns are ready, willing and able to actively support their local teams and, as it turns out, are some of the most devoted and engaged fans in the country.

That super-fan energy, and a market that has expanded substantially in the last few decades, is helping bolster a pair of active pursuits that made 2023 a year of frothy activity when it comes to adding even more elite sports competition to Utah’s options for local fun and distraction.

In April, the same family that helped usher in Utah’s big league sports era in the 1980s after purchasing the financially struggling Utah Jazz to keep the NBA team in the Beehive State announced they’re leading out on an effort to bring Major League Baseball to Utah.

The Miller family and the Larry H. Miller Company announced the formation of Big League Utah, a broad-based community coalition, united in the belief that Utah is the “Future of America’s Pastime.” The spring unveiling also identified a shovel-ready site for a new MLB ballpark at the 100-acre Rocky Mountain Power District on Salt Lake City’s west side.

“We believe in the power of sports to elevate and unify communities,” Gail Miller, co-founder and owner of the Larry H. Miller Company, said in an April press statement. “Larry and I risked everything to acquire the Utah Jazz, and it was a tremendous honor to ensure it thrived as a model franchise. We now have an opportunity to welcome Major League Baseball to Utah and invite all Utahns to join us in this effort.”

Related

• If Utah gets a major league baseball team, what happens to the Salt Lake Bees?

• ‘Utah is ripe for it’: Jazz owner Ryan Smith on bringing NHL to the Beehive State

• Swinging for the fences: New Big League Utah coalition aiming to bring MLB to Salt Lake City

The Big League coalition includes Utah’s federal, state and local decision-makers, business and community leaders, former MLB baseball players and potential investors.

“Over the past year, we have enjoyed our ongoing conversation with Major League Baseball and have formally registered our interest in Salt Lake being considered an expansion market,” Steve Starks, CEO of the Larry H. Miller Company, said back in April. “We have strong reasons to believe we will be a viable candidate. The response has been universally enthusiastic as we have invited others to join the coalition. Anytime you’re in the running to add a professional baseball team to your market, you jump at that opportunity. Baseball becomes synonymous with great cities across this country. It helps form their identity.”

Starks said Utah wasn’t ready to be a part of the conversation almost 25 years ago when the MLB last expanded the league. But, a lot has changed since then and the state is now well situated to host a team from the bigs.

“If you look at the growth of Utah over the past two decades, it’s been phenomenal,” Starks said. “We have the nation’s strongest economy, No. 1 job growth, a very diverse economy and a young population. It’s a strength of market we weren’t able to offer the last time baseball expanded. But now we have so many tailwinds and so much momentum we’re getting noticed on a national level and are definitely in the conversation.”

MLB leadership has been publicly bullish on the idea of adding two expansion teams to the league but said it was waiting out unresolved stadium issues facing the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A’s before moving forward with the idea. By the end of summer, however, those boxes appeared to have been checked and sports prognosticators were quick to offer weigh-ins on what cities may be in the running for a pair of expansion choices that is likely to include one team in the eastern half of the country and the other from the west.

On separate podcasts from late September, Buster Olney and former Cy Young Award winner David Cone said that after Nashville, Salt Lake City seems the most likely city for an expansion franchise.

“That second team, it’s an open question and there’s opportunity there for some billionaire to step up and to do big things,” Olney said on the “Baseball Tonight” podcast. “If I’m just sitting here guessing today, and that’s all it is is a guess, I think it’s going to be Salt Lake City.”

Olney said he thinks baseball wants to “even out the geography” and put a team in the Mountain time zone.

Cone offered his opinion on his podcast, “Toeing the Slab,” calling Nashville the No. 1 contender.

“The second one is still probably a little bit up in the air. There’s a lot of talk about Portland, Oregon, at one point, but I think Salt Lake City, Utah, might have moved ahead,” he said. “That’s my handicap right now, but expansion will be on the horizon. We will get two new teams. Nashville will be one, and Salt Lake City will be the other.”

The spring of 2023 also saw some of the first substantive percolations of Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith’s effort to bring an NHL team to Utah.

Smith has made no secret of his interest in adding an NHL franchise to his Smith Entertainment Group holdings, which already include the Jazz along with ownership stakes in MLS club Real Salt Lake and freshly returned NWSL team Utah Royals. Both Smith and NHL executives have referenced 2023 meetings at which Smith’s interest in becoming an owner were discussed.

Earlier this year, speculation was churning about the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes relocating to Utah, an idea that was powered, at least in part, by Arizona voters rejecting a proposal for a new Tempe hockey arena for the team in May. That possibility was blunted a bit by the August news that Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo had acquired property in Mesa, Arizona, and was working on plans to build out a privately funded sports and entertainment complex, that would include a new home arena for the team.

While the success or failure of Meruelo’s project, and the Coyotes’ long-term prospects to stay in Arizona, will hinge on his ability to find funding partners, the possibility of an NHL expansion also remains viable. And, the expansion proposition has a little extra shine on it thanks to the fast-track successes of the league’s last two additions, the Las Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken.

While Smith’s opportunities to bring NHL action to the Beehive State could come from different quarters, he sees Utah as primed and ready to support a new local pro sports brand.

“We’re already the winter sports capital of the world,” Smith said in a interview earlier this year on Canadian hockey podcast “32 Thoughts.” “The Olympics are coming back, seven million people are coming here every year for winter sports and almost every single winter sport is headquartered here in one way or another.

“If you look at the success we’ve had and how much people want to go out ... it’s a very family-focused environment where people really want to go to games. We’ve had 240 straight sellouts at the Utah Jazz. Last year was not our best year as we went through a rebuilding and it didn’t matter. The place was full.”

Smith said he believes hockey is “mesmerizing a lot of people right now, the growth of it,” and he sees a potential Salt Lake NHL team as being able to emulate the high success of the league’s latest expansion efforts in Seattle and Las Vegas. The Golden Knights, founded in 2017, won their first Stanley Cup in June, defeating the Florida Panthers 4-1 in the best-of-seven championship series. And the Kraken, which joined the league in 2021, has already built a valuation north of $1 billion, the 10th highest in the league in just its second year of play.