Tij Iginla could be the face of Utah’s relocated NHL franchise – but there’s no rush

Credit: Tij Iginla (Steven Ellis/Daily Faceoff)

LAS VEGAS – Ryan Smith has only been an NHL owner for a couple months, but he’s already perfecting his hockeyspeak.

He met to reporters Friday in the minutes before the 2024 NHL Draft kicked off at Sphere. With the first pick in Utah Hockey Club history slated for sixth overall, Smith’s team would have a chance to draft a high-upside player. Asked if it was important to find a face of his new franchise, a marketable icon to help cultivate newbie hockey fans to fill the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Smith didn’t bite.

“One of the things I love about hockey is that it truly is a team game,” Smith told Daily Faceoff. “And it’s one of the things that is inspiring, because it takes more than just one star. There’s not a lot of ‘I’ in hockey, right? It’s ‘we.’ So we’ll see. I’ll leave what that’s gonna take up to [GM Bill Armstrong].

It’s true that the team concept applies far more to the NHL than to, say, the NBA, in which Smith owns the Utah Jazz. A single dominant player can often change a pro basketball franchise’s fate, which makes sense when the top players are on the court for three quarters of every game. In the NHL, on the other hand, the past two Stanley Cup champions in the Florida Panthers and Vegas Golden Knights embodied the team concept more than the star-based model.

But when Utah was on the clock Friday at pick No. 6 and Tij Iginla was still there, it must’ve been difficult not to get excited and forget all that team talk. A star was sitting right in front of the Utah brass. Tij, son of NHL legend Jarome, ripped up the WHL this season and has the pedigree and talent to become a bigtime attraction for a franchise that needs one more than ever. He buried 47 goals in 64 games with the Kelowna Rockets this past season, adding nine goals in 11 playoff games. He tore it up with Canada at the Under-18 Worlds. As Armstrong explained Friday night, one thing that stood out about Iginla was the way he got better and better as his draft year progressed. They also “love him as a person and player” and were blown away by the character he displayed when they interviewed him.

But most importantly, the young man, like his 600-goal-scorer father, can put the puck in the net.

“I told him when we met with him, ‘We’ve got a lot of 20-goal scorers on our roster – We’re looking for a 50-goal scorer. No pressure,’ ”Armstrong said with a laugh.

It’s true; Utah really needs a game-breaking sniper. The franchise, relocated from Arizona, hasn’t even had a 40-goal scorer this millennium. Many of its best young forwards, from Clayton Keller to Logan Cooley to Nick Schmaltz to Matias Maccelli, identify more as playmakers. Dylan Guenther is a goal-scorer by trade and has flashed promise suggesting he’ll be a good one at the NHL level, but Iginla arguably has the higher ceiling.

That said, despite wanting to capture the imagination of their new fan base, Utah doesn’t consider itself in a hurry. Armstrong insisted Friday that the relocation “doesn’t accelerate” the rebuild process and pointed out that so many key contributors on the Florida Panthers’ 2024 championship team were “10 years in.”

Iginla is realistic about his timeline, too. He understands that he’s still just 17 years old. His dad, taken five slots later at 11^th overall in 1995, turned 18 that summer, didn’t see NHL action until the 1996 playoffs and didn’t play regular-season games until his rookie season of 1996-97. And as Tij mentioned Friday, his family tends to physically mature relatively late, so he’s hoping he isn’t done growing at six-foot and 186 pounds. Ideally, he’ll shoot up and fill out a tiny bit more in his age-18 season before taking a real run at the NHL in 2025-26.

“I’d definitely like to play a full year as a 19 year-old,” he said. “It’s hard to say when you haven’t shared the ice with actual NHL guys yet, so it’s hard to know exactly where I’m at right now, but that’s a baseline goal I have for myself.”

It’s fitting that the son of a Hall of Famer would be so grounded about his future, even when he’s probably giddy with excitement. Iginla has the scoring talent to be a potential face of Utah’s franchise one day – and his maturity and patience to get there probably increase his odds of doing so.

“I’ve gotten a ton of advice for [my dad] for this particular moment,” Iginla said. “It all goes fast, and there will be a day when I’m looking back on it as one of the proudest days of my life.”

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Tij Iginla could be the face of Utah’s relocated NHL franchise – but there’s no rush

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