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Greg Wyshynski
Utah Hockey Club will not be moving forward with “Yeti” or “Yetis” as its team nickname and will hold an in-arena fan vote to pick a new one.
The team expects to announce a permanent name and identity before the 2025-26 NHL season. The new fan vote comes after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected names and logos that Utah Hockey Club had submitted for approval, in particular “Utah Yetis,” which was widely assumed to be the franchise’s eventual nickname.
Fans attending Utah’s next four home games will have the opportunity to vote for three options using tablets stationed around Delta Center. The team estimates that could be upward of 15,000 fans per game.
The name options are:
• Utah Hockey Club. The team’s current name was meant as a placeholder for its inaugural season in Salt Lake City, after Smith Entertainment Group purchased the Arizona Coyotes franchise. “It has always been our intention to let our season one identity as Utah Hockey Club, the team’s performance and the amazing response from our fans hold the conversation through our inaugural season,” said Chris Armstrong, the team’s president of hockey operations.
• Utah Mammoth. This nickname was one of six finalists from a fan vote held last year, along with Utah Blizzard, Utah Hockey Club, Utah Outlaws, Utah Venom and Utah Yeti. Team owner Ryan Smith later revealed on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show” that Mammoth had made the final four options.
• Utah Wasatch. This is an entirely new option for Utah’s team name, as it wasn’t included in the initial 20 names presented to fans in a survey. It references Utah’s Wasatch mountain range, known for its many ski resorts. But the team acknowledges that it’s basically a replacement for Utah Yeti. The name will allow the team to use a “mythical snow creature in the form of a Yeti” as its mascot, according to Mike Maughan of Smith Entertainment Group.
The fans will vote on these three names and two logos: One for the Utah Mammoth and one that would be used for either the Utah Hockey Club or the Utah Wasatch that features the Yeti-like creature, which Maughan said is known as the “mountain defender” logo internally.
This might not be the last fan vote, according to Maughan, who said there could be another round after this one. But he reiterated that whatever the fans decide in these votes will be the name of the Utah team beginning next season.
Maughan said the team submitted all 20 names on its initial survey to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. But the biggest refusal was for “Yeti” or “Yetis.” It was widely expected, even among Utah players, that “Yeti” or “Yetis” would eventually win out as the team name.
The USPTO rejected a trademark application from the team for “Utah Yetis” because of the “likelihood of confusion” for consumers to other companies and brands that use the name. Utah Hockey Club was seeking to use “Utah Yetis” on a variety of clothing items. The USPTO said a database search turned up “a number of third-party marks registered for use in connection with the same or similar goods and/or services as those of both applicant and registrant in this case.”
Among those parties was Yeti Coolers LLC, which makes drinkware, coolers and clothing.
“We engaged deeply with Yeti Cooler Company and worked with them over a process to see if there was some coexistence agreement that we could engage with them on,” said Maughan. “They have a unique and strong trademark on anything published Yeti or Yetis. We did not have a coexistence agreement with Yeti and therefore have decided to move on from that name.”
Maughan said the team anticipated trademark hurdles for “Yeti” and other names — including Utah Hockey Club, which also was rejected but faces less of a barrier to future approval — and thus anticipated the need to pivot. He said the team is confident the three names in the fan vote should clear the USPTO process.
“We have an incredible team, and we are very confident we have a clear path to each of those names,” he said. “We have strategies to approach each of them and feel that we’re on very solid ground as we continue forward.”
Fan voting on the new name will begin during Tuesday night’s game against the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins.
Utah Hockey Club is in its first season playing in Salt Lake City. The Arizona Coyotes franchise was sold to Utah Jazz owners Smith Entertainment Group in April 2024. SEG acquired the franchise, its players and its hockey operations department in the sale, although the team is considered a new franchise rather than an extension of the Coyotes’ legacy.