SALT LAKE CITY ā The Utah Mammoth needed a confidence-building win after going 1-2 on the team’s season-opening road trip.
And that’s exactly what they got with a 3-1 home opening win over the Calgary Flames on Wednesday at the Delta Center.
“Good to be back home, good to be in front of our family,” head coach Andre Tourigny said. “It was a positive outing.”
The Mammoth family grew by one during pre-game festivities, with Tusky revealed as the team’s new mascot, bringing an energy from the start of the game the team was able to “feed off,” according to Tourigny.
Utah conceded the opening goal to Calgary at the 8:37 mark and received three penalties in a scoreless opening period, with Tourigny saying the team was “maybe a little bit too into it.”
The team recovered well in the second period, though, getting the equalizer from Barrett Hayton just one minute in, and a go-ahead goal at the 4:24 mark from JJ Peterka, which ended up being the game-winner.
“Preseason was different, but I think as the season started, I was ready,” Peterka said of his adjustment to Utah after being traded from Buffalo in the offseason. “It’s not much thinking anymore on the ice, which is good. I just try to play instinctively out there.”
Utah had six power play opportunities in the game and failed to score on any of them, bringing the team’s season mark to just 1-of-16 on the man advantage overall.
The Mammoth did get an empty-netter in the final seconds as an insurance goal, though, as Kevin Stenlund’s clearance bounced off the wall and into the corner of the open net to send fans confidently to the exits with under 30 seconds remaining.
The first “Veggie” chants of the season rained down in the third period as Utah goaltender Karel Vejmelka maintained the Mammoth lead with 19 saves and a .950 save percentage on the night.
“It was unbelievable, just the saves he made,” Peterka said of Vejmelka. “We gave up kind of a lot of scoring chances, but when we needed Veggie, he was better than ever.”
Utah continues its four-game homestand with a weekend double of the San Jose Sharks on Friday at 7 p.m. MDT and the Boston Bruins on Sunday at 5 p.m. MDT.
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.
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