Recent Moves Help Armstrong’s Plan Progress, ‘You’re Starting to Build Now’

Trades, cap utilization, & draft assets highlight how professional & amateur scouting teams work together

Heading into last week’s NHL Draft, Utah Hockey Club General Manager Bill Armstrong was sitting on a wealth of cap space, draft assets, and prospects.

Within the span of just a few days, they helped him cash in handsomely.

Since last Friday, Armstrong and the club’s amateur and pro scouting teams made 11 draft picks, completed two of the weekend’s biggest trades, re-signed valuable restricted free agents, and welcomed a handful of unrestricted free agents to the Beehive State.

The sudden influx of talent highlights how the organization’s rebuild blueprint continues to yield results.

“We’re just hoping to make that next step, that’s important for the group.” Armstrong said. “We’re still a young, young team. There’s going to be nights we look like world beaters with the young guys running up front, and there’s going to be nights we take it on the chin a little bit. 

“If we can be a little more consistent and take a step, with all the penalty kills and being a little bit more consistent in certain areas, it’s going to be a fun year for us.”

Heading into day one of the NHL Draft, Utah had a little over $40 million in cap space, 13 total picks, and a cupboard stocked with talented prospects.

By the end of the day on Monday, the organization had made 11 picks (including two first-rounders), rounded out its blue line by trading for Mikhail Sergachev and John Marino, signed unrestricted free agent Ian Cole and Kevin Stenlund, and re-signed restricted free agents Sean Durzi, Juuso Välimäki, and Michael Kesselring, while also issuing a qualifying offer to Barrett Hayton.

Some of those acquisitions came at a cost, as Armstrong traded regular NHL defenseman J.J. Moser and budding prospect Conor Geekie, along with a handful of picks, but he has done anything but mortgage the future, retaining 10 picks for next season (including six over the first three rounds) while still maintaining a little over $15 million in cap space.

“You’re starting to build now,” Armstrong said. “A good team that competes for a Stanley Cup, or wins a Stanley Cup, almost 50 percent is traded for. We’re going to amass these good players and these young picks, but we’re also going to have to move those players for our needs.”

The approach has been calculated and well-executed. Throughout Armstrong’s rebuild the core has remained steadily intact, but the club has brought in short-term pieces to help develop a strong culture under head coach André Tourigny and his staff.

The progress heading into the fourth year of the rebuild is promising, but Assistant General Manager David Ludwig said the maneuvering is far from over.

“We’ve done a lot of studies on teams in rebuilds, and hopefully we’re getting on the other side of it, but it doesn’t change overnight,” he said. “We don’t want to just spend a bunch of money, we’ve seen some other teams do that and not take that next step, and then they’re in that ‘tweener’ stage. 

“It’s exciting, but our pro scouts are putting in the work to do the due diligence on the available free agents and who will be a good fit for us, not just now, but 5, 6, 7, 8 years from now, when we are championship contenders.”

Much like the All-Star scouting staff that Armstrong assembled on the amateur side, he has an equally experienced and talented professional scouting team, led by Director of Professional Scouting Alan Hepple. 

He joined the then-Arizona Coyotes in 2021 after spending 19 years with the Colorado Avalanche, where he had acted as the club’s Director of Amateur Scouting. Hepple has a keen eye for talent, and is committed to Armstrong’s method of building a perennial championship contender.

He said Utah’s positioning heading into the 2024 NHL Draft may have been the strongest of any club, and it’s hard to argue that point considering the moves the team made on Saturday.

“Having the currency with draft picks, you hold all the power,” Hepple said. “You can go after players and make some deals. Bill has done a great job over the last three years of acquiring all of these picks. Keep it going, and this is the time where we can spend some. 

“It’s a good feeling to have.”

The collective moves blend the team’s existing chemistry with the talent and experience of the newcomers, all while addressing some of the needs the team had in the offseason.

“You see the additions, and what I like about what Bill and his group did, we had needs, but we had a huge belief in the players we had internally. We liked our group a lot. We liked the chemistry in our group. We like the players we had,” Tourigny said.

“Bill and his group did a fantastic job to attack our needs and prove we liked the rest of the team we had, the group we had, the tools we had.”

Durzi, who signed a four-year contract on Sunday, agreed.

“To think about guys who have done it, who have gone all the way, who know what it takes, it’s huge,” he said. “Having those guys injected into the culture, it’s huge for us.”

That cohesiveness extends beyond the players, as well.

The entire Utah Hockey Ops department has remained tight-knit throughout the team’s rebuild, relocation, and everything in between. Hepple said that type of bond is rare to find in any sport, and he’s proud to work alongside his colleagues every day.

“It’s just all good people; We love spending time with one another,” he said. “It just goes back to the people that Bill Armstrong hires. Everyone is a good person. They’re good people, and it goes a long way to get the job done.”

Armstrong’s plan is in full effect from top to bottom, and the newly-minted Utah players are set to help the team take a collective leap from the 2023-24 season.

“They’re going to play a big role in some of that synergy, just to make us better. Just to take us over that next step we have to take,” Armstrong said. “I think our guys our extremely tight from what they’ve been through.”