Utah Hockey Club Puts Name Choice in Fans’ Hands After Yeti Fiasco

The Utah Hockey Club is abandoning efforts to rename the franchise permanently to the Yeti or Yetis, instead unveiling three other candidates in a major twist in the long-running and high-profile branding effort. 

Just days after the NHL franchise ran into fierce opposition from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to use the Yeti name that had been widely seen as a likely choice, it acknowledged it was unable to strike a “coexistence agreement” with the popular brand of drinkware, bags, and coolers. That, in turn, helped imperil any efforts by the team to counter the provisional trademark rejection from the USPTO.

“The difference with Yeti was the trademarks they have on clothing and licensed products,” Mike Maughan, executive for Smith Entertainment Group, which owns the team, tells Front Office Sports. That same licensing is core to any pro sports team. “It had everything to do with the trademark that they have on clothing and licensed products.”

As a result, the team will now invite fans to vote on three finalist possibilities: the preexisting options of keeping the Utah Hockey Club name or the Mammoth, and a new option of Wasatch—referencing the local mountain range and essentially acting as a replacement choice for Yeti.

The fan vote will be held among attending fans at the Delta Center over the next four home games, using tablets stationed around the arena, with a total potential vote count of more than 50,000. The club still intends to have the new name and logo finalized in advance of the 2025–2026 NHL season. Maughan predicted an end to the trademark issues surrounding the process and said the team is on “very solid ground” to complete the process with any of the three finalists.

“The entire process has been an intentional narrowing down,” Maughan says. 

Tough Road

Both Maughan and external branding experts, however, acknowledged the difficulty of any new trademarking effort. There have now been so many different types of business ventures, in and out of sports, involving established, existing language that creating a new brand often involves also forming a new word.

“Us trademark lawyers have a nerdy little joke: ‘Have we run out of names to trademark?’” Zakari Kurtz, founder of Sneaker Law Firm PLLC, tells FOS. “It’s comical because you can trademark just about anything, and there aren’t many names left available.”