Utah HC forward Clayton Keller appears to leak team's name for 2025-26 season

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Cooper Godin
September 15, 2024 (12:00)

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Utah HC forward Clayton Keller appeared to leak the team's name for 2025-26 season in a recent interview.

In a matter of weeks, Utah will embark on their first season in the National Hockey League but will do so without any team name or branding. The move to go with 'Hockey Club' or 'HC' for short, has irked some fans around the game, but it takes quite some time to perfect branding and uniforms, potentially as many as 12-18 months.

While the NHL's newest team will be known as Utah Hockey Club for the 2024-25 season, they are expected to have an actual name and logo in place for the following year and it appears that it may have been leaked recently by someone on the roster - Clayton Keller.

In an interview with NHL.com's Mike Zeisberger at the NHL Players Media Tour in Las Vegas, Keller said that it sounds like they'll be going with the name 'Yeti' starting in 2025.

"It sounds like it's going to be the Yeti, but I don't know," Keller said. "We'll see what happens. Whatever they choose, I think it'll be a good one."

Keller isn't the first member of the Utah Hockey Club organization to mention the likelihood of 'Yeti' being their name beginning next year.

During an interview at the NHL Entry Draft in Las Vegas in June, Utah General Manager Bill Armstrong let it slip that Yeti may be the team's name in the future.

"When we hit pick 5, that's when we knew. That's when we knew he was going to be a Utah Yeti, I think." Armstrong said.

He added, "I'm not allowed to pick the name, but I think the little kids in Utah vote about 25 time a day. So I think they got it."

In early June, the fan vote for Utah's team name was reduced to six from 20 with the following still in the running: Utah Blizzard, Utah HC (Hockey Club), Utah Mammoth, Utah Outlaws, Utah Venom and Utah Yeti.

We'll have to wait and see what Utah decides to go with when they make things official in the new year, but Yeti sounds like the favourite among many fans across the hockey world.

Source: Mike Zeisberger/NHL.com
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