Yeti was already taken by a popular cooler manufacturer. Blizzard belonged to a video game company. Venom had been claimed by a company that makes snowboarding gear.
When the tech billionaire Ryan Smith bought the struggling Arizona Coyotes of the N.H.L. in late April and then relocated the team to Salt Lake City, the move seemed to come at the speed of a Bobby Hull slap shot.
But finding a long-term name for the franchise is another story.
For now, it is going by a generic placeholder name, the Utah Hockey Club. As the team underwent its rapid move in the spring (normally, sports franchise relocations unfold over years, not months), its new ownership began to submit a flurry of trademark applications for possible names.
It ran straight into a bureaucratic goalie ready to block every shot it took: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the guardian of an increasingly crowded marketplace of brand names.
Initial options included the Blizzard, Outlaws, Mammoth, Venom and Yeti, and the current name, the Utah Hockey Club. When the franchise heard back from the trademark office, each application received a preliminary rejection.
Other brands had already grabbed the trademarks for several of the names. In a nonbinding refusal, dated Jan. 9, of the hockey club’s application for the Yeti trademark, the office cited a “likelihood of confusion,” apparently concerned that fans could not tell the difference between a water bottle and an abominable snowman. The same explanation was given for Blizzard and Venom.
So on Wednesday, the leaders of the Utah Hockey Club said they were going back to the drawing board. The three options now on the table: Utah Hockey Club, the Wasatch and the Mammoth. Wasatch, a new entry, is a nod to the Wasatch mountain range, whose peaks loom over Salt Lake City.
The franchise’s initial submission to trademark the Mammoth name, which is used by the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League, did not immediately fail because of a competing brand; the trademark office cited administrative issues with its application.
But an effort to reach an agreement with the Yeti cooler company on a shared trademark failed, so the team ruled out Yeti as a mascot, said Mike Maughan, an executive with Smith’s company, Smith Entertainment Group. The team would not have been able to use a Yeti image on clothing or other licensed gear, he said.
“We engaged deeply with Yeti cooler company and worked with them over a process to see if there was some coexistence agreement that we could engage with them on,” Maughan said at a news conference on Wednesday. The cooler company, he added, has “a unique and strong trademark.”
The Yeti cooler company did not respond to a request for comment.
Fans who attended the team’s game against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Wednesday night were invited to cast votes for one of the three remaining possible team names. Voting will continue at home games on Friday, Sunday and Tuesday, the team said.
If fans elect to stick with Utah Hockey Club, it may present another issue because generic phrases cannot be trademarked.
The team does not need to trademark its name. But lacking one could make it difficult for the franchise to prevent people from selling knockoff gear, said Jonas Anderson, who teaches patent law at the University of Utah.
“If they adopt the Utah Hockey Club without a trademark, they could sell Utah Hockey Club gear,” he said. “But so could I.”
Maughan, the team executive, said that any name would pose “trademark issues that will have to be dealt with.” But he remained optimistic.
“We have an incredible team, and we’re very confident we have a clear path to each of those names,” he said. The team plans to unveil a final name before the 2025-26 season.
The Utah Hockey Club is not the first sports team to wade through a sluggish renaming process. When the N.F.L. team in Washington, D.C., retired its previous name in 2020, finding a new one took 18 months, a process that was slowed by trademark challenges.
In the interim, the team was called the Washington Football Team. Now they are the Washington Commanders.
As the trademark registry grows more crowded, sports franchises are struggling to secure workable names, trademark law experts say.
“There’s been an explosion of trademark protection,” said Jeanne Fromer, a law professor at New York University who has conducted empirical studies on trademarking. “Pretty much all the dictionary words are taken. All common last names are taken.”
And sports teams are limited by their desire to resonate with local preferences and convey characteristics like fierceness, said Ashley R. Dobbs, a professor of trademark law at the University of Richmond.
“We’re running out of words,” she said, adding that any franchise picking a mascot going forward would have to “do their branding homework.”
Teams can still face trademark trouble even after settling on a name. In 2023, the Seattle Kraken, another N.H.L. franchise, was sued in federal court by a man who said the team’s gear violated trademark rights he had acquired for the Seattle Metropolitans, a pro team that last played in 1924. The case is ongoing.
And the Cleveland Guardians, an M.L.B. team that changed its name in 2021, was likewise sued by a Cleveland roller derby club that shared the Guardians name. The baseball team and the roller derby club reached a settlement.
The Utah Hockey Club is linked to another team in the state with a curious name.
In 2020, Smith purchased Salt Lake City’s N.B.A. team, the Utah Jazz.
When the Jazz relocated in 1979 from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, some expected the team to pick a new name befitting its Mountain West location. But a contest to pick one produced no winners, Sam Battistone, the team’s owner at the time, recalled later.
And so the name stuck, much as Utah Hockey Club might.
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