Ryan Smith never met Larry Miller, never spoke with the man, not once.
The Delta Center is photographed during an introduction for the Utah NHL team on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. On screen are team owners Ryan and Ashley Smith.Whether the two business titans/team owners would have been friends is anybody’s guess. This much is certain: They were/are distinct, different individuals.
When Smith and his wife, Ashley, first addressed the Coyotes in Arizona, after news of their acquisition of the franchise had just begun to sink in, they filled a group of stitched-up, leathery-tough and slightly-confused hockey players — athletes and coaches who were trying to process what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks was going on and what it meant for their futures — full of hope and promise about the place, the community for which they’d soon enough be skating and busting their humps in the...
Miller bought the Jazz when he had no business doing so, spending well in excess of his total worth and wealth to do so, to save them from becoming someone else’s team in someone else’s state. If you listen carefully, you can hear Smith echoing all of that now, and saying the same about owning an NHL team.Ahh, the winning. Ask Larry somewhere out there in the great beyond, that’s the sheerest cliff to climb in the rugged, mountainous, competitive regions of the NBA and the NHL. It’s a bit like organizing an ascent on Mount Everest, only with other groups of climbers on the trail dead set on bumping and bouncing you and your uniformed sherpas over the edge and into the icy abyss below.
Utah’s new NHL team this past season did not make the playoffs, although many observers believe the club has enough talented young players and draft picks and other options to make a strong move in the years ahead. The hockey team, despite all the uproar and uncertainty surrounding the team’s ownership and location and lack of an NHL-worthy arena and the entirety of the off-the-ice mess all around, is ahead of the basketball team in that regard.
When Smith met with the players in Arizona, he took the whole outfit on an excursion to Scottsdale National Golf Club, where, while golfing with different groups of players, he asked everyone in sight what he could do not just to make the move to Utah smoother, but to help them in the greater context. Reports say he did what too many team owners don’t do: He listened.
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