Will the Utah hockey club sign the star forward?

The team has over $40 million in cap space, but patience may still be the game.

The National Hockey League returns to Las Vegas this weekend at the Sphere, its most packed venue, and on Monday the league opens its free agency period, making many of its stars available for acquisition.

The Utah Hockey Club will have new fans and new owners to please, and it will have the most cap room in the NHL — more than $40 million.

With that amount of cash and that background, it would be very easy to put it all on the line.

It's so obvious. It's so expected.

It wouldn't be Bill Armstrong either.

“We're in Year 4 of a rebuild,” the team's general manager said this week. “Let's not get too ahead of ourselves.”

For GM, life is different now than it was before, but the work remains the same.

Armstrong is realizing he's something of a celebrity in Utah. People wave at him on the streets around Salt Lake City, he says. When an Uber picks him up, they know who he is. That didn't happen in Arizona, he says, where there were more people in the desert, but more attention on other things.

There's no doubt that Utahns will have their eyes firmly set on their new major league entertainment and the soon-to-be-renamed Utah Hockey Club. But what Utahns want isn't just hockey, they want good hockey, playoff hockey. With ticket prices so steep, they'll want something to keep them entertained.

Oh, that's not the only pressure on Armstrong: He has to please his new owner, Ryan Smith, who just spent more than $1 billion, likely above market value, on his new professional sports team.

Smith also appointed Chris Armstrong, a former sports agent with no ties to the Bills, as his new head. Armstrong had worked in both hockey and golf agency roles over the past few years (his most famous client was Utah golfer Tony Finau), but was named president of hockey operations for the hockey club shortly after Smith bought the team.

All of this could lead to a situation where you need to flush.

Got a ton of money? Yes. A new boss to impress? Yes. A ton of die-hard fans to get excited about? A cheque for over 34,000 season tickets.

The team can now spend big money, preferably on a flashy new forward. 57-goal Cup winner Sam Reinhart and 40-goal scorer Jake Guenzel are both on the free-agent market. There have even been spurious rumors that Utah would acquire Maple Leafs star Mitch Marner.

But Armstrong said the team

He believes the team's front office needs to focus on defense instead of offense.

“We need to add some defensive players to strengthen our team and take the next step,” Armstrong said.

He believes teams should use some of their available salary cap space this offseason, but keep most of it aside to pay promising young players.

“There's a lot of good things we can do, but I don't think we necessarily think filling the cap is going to help us win the Stanley Cup next year,” he said.

He doesn't think the sixth pick in Friday's draft, nor the other 13 players selected in the 2024 NHL Draft, will be playing in the top division anytime soon. “They've played a lot of time at the bottom, they've had great developmental roles at the bottom, and when they move up, they compete a lot harder.”

He believes his team can follow in the footsteps of the newly crowned champion Florida Panthers: “Florida beat Edmonton by +11 (Game 7). We're going to continue to build a team that has not only hockey flair, but size and grit as well.”

And he believes his team can bring the Stanley Cup home to Utah — maybe not now, but sometime in the future.

His plan isn't to accelerate the Utah hockey club's success — it will come when the young players he's putting together are ready to go — and when that happens, Armstrong believes the process will be one of the longest-lasting, sustained successes in modern NHL history.

Only time will tell if that's the case, but as Utah enters its first offseason with an NHL team, he's not looking to make any leaps but rather small, smart steps.