SALT LAKE CITY — After every NHL game, three players who performed well are selected as the “stars of the game,” but sometimes you need more than three stars to fully encapsulate what goes down on the ice.
That’s where “Three More Stars” comes in, offering three alternative best parts of Utah Mammoth games for your reading pleasure.
Tusky is a hit!
The home opener could’ve started really well or really poorly at the Delta Center on Wednesday, depending on how the promised “big surprise” was received by fans.
As Tusky the mascot emerged triumphantly from his block of ice and skated a victory lap around the rink, he immediately endeared himself to Mammoth faithful. Many on social media went so far as to say “they would die” for Tusky, and the phrase “Tusky Forever” was being repeated by the end of the night.
The reveal went over well, with fans and media remarking that the “mean,” “muscular,” and “fierce” look fits the physical sport of hockey and gives the team an edge.
Tusky’s appearances during the game were limited, taking part in a kids hockey game during intermission and “extinguishing” a Calgary Flames fan on the Jumbotron, but the 3-1 victory gave the 6-foot-5 Mammoth a chance to stand at center ice and wave the Utah flag for a final send-off on homecoming night.
The flipped defensive pairings worked
No one on the blue line earned an official star on the night, but the group of six defensemen put together a solid outing that could’ve been a shutout if not for the soft opening goal.
Head coach Andre Tourigny elected to swap two players in his top two pairings ahead of the home opener, moving rookie Dmitri Simashev into the top pairing with alternate captain and fellow Russian Mikhail Sergachev, while John Marino joined veteran newcomer Nate Schmidt in the second pairing.
That second pairing worked particularly well on Wednesday, with the highest plus-minus on the night and Marino stuffing the stat sheet with an assist, a shot, two blocked shots and a takeaway.
Marino missed the first half of last season and could become a major contributor on both sides of the ice this season in the middle of his prime at 28 years old.
Schmidt brings a calm confidence to the young Mammoth squad as the second-oldest player behind fellow defenseman Ian Cole, and is also coming off a Stanley Cup championship with the Florida Panthers.
He has fully bought into Utah in just three months after signing in free agency, walking the “blue carpet” with team dog Archie before the home opener and giving his token “Tusks Up” hand sign to the team photographer before each game.
Delta Center decibels
One of the priorities in the recent renovations made to the Delta Center was to maintain the loud, echoing atmosphere created by its steep, cavernous structure.
Rest assured, that loudness has not been affected after one summer of construction, and has even reached another level, thanks to the arrival of a real, four-horn goal horn in the rafters, said to be the first of its kind in the NHL.
Between the new horn, the rocking goal songs and a locked-in crowd, the decibels were not an issue on Wednesday, though they might have been for the visiting Calgary Flames.
“The crowd throughout the whole game was unbelievable,” forward JJ Peterka said. “It started with the anthem, in the warm-ups and just throughout the whole game. When we needed energy, we for sure got it from the crowd.”
Stay tuned for Three More Stars after Utah Mammoth games this season.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.