SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Hockey Club general manager Bill Armstrong will soon feel like a less-than-human person.
After all, humans are people with complex emotions and diverse thoughts. In the week before the draft, he becomes pretty singularly focused.
“It just gets you hooked,” Armstrong said. “You almost feel like you're not human because you have one thing on your mind. It's draft, draft, draft all week.”
The Utah Hockey Club will make its first-ever draft pick on June 28 in Las Vegas. The team will have the sixth pick in the draft and 13th overall over the two-day draft.
Would Utah take a big defenseman like Armstrong's favorite, Michigan State's Artyom Levshunov, the OHL's Sam Dickinson or 6-foot-7 Anton Shiraev? Would the team take a chance on a big center like the WHL's Kaden Lindstrom? What about forward Cole Yzerman, who might be the best goal scorer in the draft?
“I think they're talented,” Armstrong said. “They're 18-year-olds, some of them still have developmental years ahead of them, and we're just scratching the surface of what they can become, but they're good talent.”
While it's a new team for Utah, it's not so much for Armstrong, who is in the fourth year of a planned rebuild and gives himself some options entering that fourth year.
Utah has seven draft picks in the first three rounds this season and next season, plus six more in the first three rounds in 2026-27. The hockey club also has roughly $40 million in cap space to use in free agents (the team has no blueliners under contract for next season), the most in the NHL.
Now that a larger asset and deeper-pocketed owner is at the helm of the ship, is Armstrong ready to put his chips on the table? Hmm, not really.
More money means more options, but Armstrong wants to build a team that can compete for a decade, not just a few seasons, so don't expect him to squander money in his first season in Utah or try to cash in on years of assets he's built up in pursuit of a Cup (Utah is expected to make short-term free-agent signings to fill out the roster).
The goal is to strengthen the team without sacrificing its future, and the draft gives Armstrong and his team a chance to do just that.
“You look at what you have at the end of the day,” Armstrong said. “Can we put all our picks together and go up there and get one guy? Or do we take a chance on four or five guys with our picks? Can we use our picks to get a guy? We have a lot of different options.”
Armstrong and his team traveled to Buffalo earlier this month for the NHL Combine and ran their own combine in Arizona “just because that's where the rink is,” he said.
Unlike NBA pre-draft workouts, NHL teams are not allowed to invite players to private sessions if they attend the NHL Combine. The top 100 NHL prospects are invited to the official Combine.
“It's an important process to get more educated on the final stages of the draft,” Armstrong said, “You're never going to beat the NHL by seven goals. You might beat them by one goal. Just be one step ahead.”
So will Utah end up using all 13 picks?
Armstrong has been on both sides of the draft pick trades, trading up collectively for the 27th, 34th and 45th picks in 2022 to select center Connor Geekie at No. 11, and then trading captain Oliver Ekman-Larsson in 2021 to acquire three draft picks. Those are just a few examples of how Armstrong is always busy.
“Wherever we go, we need to get the right players,” Armstrong said.
But he acknowledged that the majority of those conversations end with teams choosing to stay where they are.
“We got the pick here and we're going to go after it from here,” he said, “so it comes up a lot. It's all we talk about 24/7 that week. It's really incredible how obsessed we are with all the different things that can happen in the draft.”
