The National Hockey League’s latest foray into the American West has finally, after much fanfare and more than a year of deliberation, produced a name for its Salt Lake City franchise. The Utah Mammoth.

Not Mammoths. Not even Mammoth Hockey Club. Just Mammoth. Singular!

It’s as if the entire franchise, staff, and fan base are expected to move forward as one woolly, prehistoric behemoth trundling across the Bonneville Salt Flats. And while the local press and the team’s owners celebrate the “unity” and “unstoppable force” this name is supposed to evoke, I find myself compelled—by tradition, by the rules of language, and by the unspoken code of sports fandom—to object.

The Utah Hockey Club was acceptable, frankly, because it didn’t try to be clever. In fact, “Utah Hockey Club” was a perfectly serviceable placeholder, and would have made a better permanent moniker than whatever this is.

But now, in a fit of modern branding and a misreading of what makes a team name sing, we’re left with the Mammoth. Singular.

And as Tim Stout, my friend and co-host of the now dormant Sportlanders the Podcast, put it to me this morning, “Utah Mammoth is objectively not a good name.”

As in life: There are rules in sports, and then there are rules in sports naming. The first are debated by coaches and officials. The second are enforced by the collective wisdom of fans, writers, and the ghosts of franchises past.

The most basic tenet: A team name, if it is to have any staying power, any resonance, must end in “s.”

This is not a matter of mere preference, but of linguistic and cultural necessity. The “s” at the end of a team name does more than denote plurality. It signals that a team is, by definition, a collection of individuals striving toward a common goal.

Take the Yankees, the Red Wings, the Canadiens, even the lowly Coyotes—from whose bosom the Utah Hockey Club emerged. Each name evokes a group, a tribe (although that is now dicey language to use around the politically correct crowd), or a band of brothers united in pursuit of victory.

There are, of course, exceptions. The “Sox,” both Red and White, are grandfathered in by virtue of history and the delightful oddity of English spelling. But for every “Sox,” there are a dozen failed experiments in singularity: the Miami Heat, the Orlando Magic, the Colorado Avalanche.

I grew up despising the the Utah Jazz, another genuine oddity, which, if I recall correctly, were the only “non-s” team for a long time. Also, the Jazz maintaining the name in Utah after the club moved from New Orleans—the birthplace of such music—is particularly comedic.

While the Heat and the Magic (somewhat) have grown on me, I still cannot cotton the existence of the ‘Lanche as a team name.

The branding “geniuses” behind these names, while occasionally successful, always felt more than a little off in their judgment. They force the new and the “stylistic” upon sports fans who crave tradition.

These names lack the organic rhythm of the “s,” the sense of collective identity that comes from rooting for a group rather than a concept. So, the Utah Mammoth, is not just a misstep. It represents a willful disregard for the unwritten rules that make sports fandom coherent and communal. (And the new team name fails my spell check…)

Take what my friend and O’Leary Letter subscriber Hunter Hastings has to say about outdated modes of thinking that may indeed lead to such horrible and “Mammoth” decisions that have proved awful:

“General Motors perfected the 5 year new model cycle for internal combustion engine automobiles while Tesla was inventing the self-updating EV ecosystem and self-driving cars. Television networks made the slow transition from broadcast to cable distribution while Netflix was perfecting the hyper-personalization engine for streaming. Supermarkets worked on warehouses and store efficiencies while amazon was delivering to homes within the hour.

Idiots didn't run these companies.

They were playing by the old rules of management.

They optimized instead of adapted. And in a complex, fast-moving world, that's a fatal mistake.”

As Hastings relates, “optimization” is probably not what the core of sports fandom is about. It’s something more than the latest goofy name.

Ryan and Ashley Smith, Utah’s owners, have trumpeted the fact that the Mammoth name was chosen through an exhaustive, four-round fan voting process, involving more than 850,000 votes and a year’s worth of anticipation. Democracy has spoken!

But democracy, as any student of history can attest, is never the best arbiter of taste or tradition. The list of finalists—Mammoth, Outlaws, and Hockey Club—was itself a study in compromise, with each name carrying its own baggage and none truly rising to the level of greatness.

The “Outlaws” would have at least given the team a plural, and a nod to the region’s mythic past. “Hockey Club” was bland, but inoffensive, and would have allowed the fans and the press to supply their own nicknames over time.

But “Mammoth?”

The team’s own press release claims that the name “stands as a symbol of who we are, where we came from, and the unstoppable force we’re building together.” I suppose there is something to be said for the wooly mammoth as a creature of strength and endurance, but the singular form drains the name of any real power.

It’s as if the franchise is less of a team than it is a mascot in search of a roster.

This trend toward singular, conceptual team names is not unique to Utah, but it is particularly grating in this context. Looking at the NBA’s Jazz, Heat, Magic, and Thunder, the NHL’s Avalanche, Lightning, and Wild, each of these names attempts to conjure an image or an idea rather than a group of players. The result is a kind of linguistic flattening, a move away from the rich tradition of teams as collectives and toward the sterile world of corporate branding.

The Utah Mammoth is the latest victim of this trend. The name is meant to evoke the Ice Age, the prehistoric grandeur of the American West, and the “earth-shaking presence” of the team’s arrival in the NHL. But in practice, it sounds like a minor league lacrosse team or a failed energy drink.

The logo, with its stylized tusks and mountain silhouette, while genuinely terrible, is still serviceable enough to optimize for the sale of merchandise. But it cannot overcome the awkwardness of the name itself.

The rallying cry— “Tusks Up” —is a valiant effort but is completely inorganic and it will only serve to underscore the fact that the name is a singular noun pretending to be a plural.

In the year since the franchise relocated from Arizona, the team has played as the Utah Hockey Club, a name that, while lacking in flair, at least had the virtue of honesty. There is a certain dignity in simplicity, a recognition that a team’s identity is forged on the ice, not in the branding office.

The Washington Football Team, for all the mockery it endured, was a more honest and, in some ways, more resonant name than the “Commanders,” its sad replacement. The same could be said for the Utah Hockey Club. It was a name that left room for tradition to develop, for nicknames and rituals to emerge organically from the fan base.

Instead, we are left with a name that tries too hard and achieves too little. The Mammoth is not a team name. It is a concept, a marketing exercise, a missed opportunity.

The franchise had a chance to build something authentic, something rooted in the history and culture of Utah. Instead, it opted for a name that will, I suspect, age about as well as the last mammoth to wander the Wasatch.

All of this, of course, presupposes that Utah ought to have an NHL team in the first place. I remain unconvinced. The league’s relentless expansion into non-traditional markets has produced mixed results at best, and Salt Lake City, for all its charms, is not exactly a hotbed of hockey tradition.

The relocation of the Arizona Coyotes was a mercy killing, but the notion that Utah will suddenly become a hockey town may just be wishful thinking. The team’s arena is among the smallest in the league, and while renovations are planned, it remains to be seen whether the market can sustain the kind of passion and support that NHL franchises require.

In the end, the problem with the Utah Mammoth is not just the name itself, but what it represents: a triumph of process over substance, of branding over tradition, of singularity over plurality.

A team is not a mammoth. It is a herd, a pack, a family.

The “s” at the end of a team name is not an accident. It serves as the mark of a group, a community, a shared endeavor. The Utah Mammoth, for all its fan votes and marketing gloss, is a name in search of a team.

And until the Utah franchise recognizes the wisdom of tradition, it will remain, in the words of my favorite prophet, “objectively not a good name.”

As always,
Brian

P.S. – Though we talk a decent amount about sports here, when it comes to coaching, we haven’t been on the ballfields or hardwood for some time. Soon, though, I’d imagine.

What we are concerned about is personal development. Stay tuned for our podcast with Jim Murphy, one of the world's most respected leaders in this field, who just released a new book.

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