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Mammoth and Jazz owner Smith Entertainment Group is expanding the scope of the NHL’s Winter Classic, blowing out the league’s showcase outdoor game into a four-day event that also involves the NBA team and the Delta Center in downtown Salt Lake City.
Nearly 10 months after the NHL awarded the upcoming Winter Classic to the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium, SEG is reframing the event to what it’s calling “Winter Weekend.”
The four-day run will include a Jazz home game on Dec. 30 against the defending NBA champion Knicks at the Delta Center; the Dec. 31 Winter Classic between the Mammoth and Avalanche; a New Year’s Eve concert at the arena with Post Malone; another Jazz game on Jan. 1 against the Celtics; and a Jan. 2 Mammoth home game back at Delta Center against the Canucks.
The games and concert will be ticketed separately, but marketed together as SEG extends its efforts to position Utah as a top-tier sports destination.
“We have an opportunity to turn four days of sports and entertainment into something people will travel to Utah to experience and remember long after it’s over,” SEG chairman and CEO Ryan Smith said in a statement.
The NHL’s decision to have the Winter Classic in Utah arrives as NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said SEG and the Mammoth “have done everything right,” including selling out all of the team’s games, renovating the Delta Center to make it functional for hockey, and quickly building the relocated Arizona Coyotes into a playoff-caliber franchise.
The development of Winter Weekend also follows Smith’s existing strategy to position sports as a larger community cornerstone.
“We’ve come in with anchor tenants, and they’re significantly better than any retail anchor,” Smith said recently on Front Office Sports’s Portfolio Players regarding the sports-focused remaking of downtown Salt Lake City. “What they do for the community, how they grow, the attraction, the vibe, what they bring. We did a draft watch party with 5,000 people. No offense to Nordstrom, but they’re not bringing 5,000 people. But that is the ability you have with sports.”
Smith is also looking to expand Utah sports horizons into baseball, and he told FOS that he is vowing an “aggressive” push for an expansion MLB franchise.
“Our group will be pretty aggressive in how we pursue sports,” he told FOS’s Dan Roberts regarding baseball. “We do it our own way. We don’t do a lot publicly. I actually think that’s not the way expansion really gets done. Salt Lake’s ready for it, but if you saw how we operated with the NHL, it just happened. We said we wanted the NHL, and a couple of months later, we had a team, and we were rolling. The sale of the Angels, it just happened … So we’ll be aggressive if there’s an opportunity there.”
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