Before he'd even entered a legit NHL game, Logan Cooley made an exciting first impression on me. Playing a 2023 preseason contest in Melbourne for a team called the "Arizona Coyotes" (I guess that's some sort of Australian thing), Cooley flew into the attacking zone with three defenders to beat. The first two he eliminated with a nifty spin move, and the third he just weaved around like a commuter hustling to his train at rush hour. He had to be dizzy after all that movement, but he finished by putting the puck in the net anyway.
Cooley, the third overall pick out of the University of Minnesota in 2022, went on to have a very fine rookie year, scoring 20 goals at just 19 years old. In the following season, as a member of the newly formed Utah Hockey Club, he improved his first-year totals by five goals and 16 assists to finish second on the Club in points. Now in his third year as an NHL player, Cooley is currently the top scorer on an intriguing Utah Mammoth squad that's aiming to give Salt Lake City its first taste of playoff hockey. Monday night's outing was a particularly nice home win for him and his boys, as the Mammoth went toe to toe with the Vegas Golden Knights and won 5-1, with Cooley scoring four goals.
OK, two of them were empty-netters, but still, the dude had a great game, and he even assisted on the team's first goal, beating a defender before passing backward to fellow kid Dylan Guenther for a sweet shot. He doubled the lead with pure aggression off a center-ice faceoff, going straight to the net for a perfectly timed tap-in off a feed from none other than Guenther. And then he got the coolest (hehe) highlight of the night when he went nitro for a breakaway off a Vegas turnover in the attacking zone. There are very few guys in the league who can move this fast.
Mammoth goalie Karel Vejmelka, playing his best game of a weak year so far, kept the Knights off the board from there, and Cooley added some icing to the cake by converting a long-range empty-netter with over four minutes to go in the third. There were surely enough hats thrown onto the ice to cover the heads of himself and all his teammates, but hat's not all, folks: in an ultimately unsuccessful bid for more articles of clothing, Cooley added one more goal from practically the same spot a couple minutes later.
“It's awesome,” Cooley said afterward. “Just to see how excited the guys were for me, too, you get a cool feeling when you get the support of your teammates.”
The prehistoric version of the Mammoth that played in the Southwest was just dysfunctional, missing the playoffs in every non-COVID year from 2013 until their extinction. This roster, then, did not arrive in Utah with particularly high short-term expectations. However, with a mix of some solid veterans on defense and high-ceiling talents on offense, you could see the potential for evolution. Their 2024–25 season was a pretty good one, all things considered, as the Hockey Clubs finished seven points out of a playoff spot in large part due to subpar goaltending. That problem hasn't been fixed, but at this point in the season, they're eighth in the West.
Not bad! Sure, Winnipeg and Edmonton are among the teams breathing down their necks, which is cause for some anxiety, but the skaters here are all right. The addition of Nate Schmidt from Florida has created a strong second defensive pairing with John Marino, which backs up the work of a Mammoth pillar in Mikhail Sergachev. And JJ Peterka, acquired from Buffalo in the offseason, is still just 23 years old and on pace to top his career high of 28 goals, providing some necessary scoring depth. Toss the deadly duo of Cooley and Guenther into the mix, plus longer-term contributors to this group like Nick Schmaltz and superstar captain Clayton Keller, and you've got yourself a hockey club. If you weren't paying attention to them before, U'tahta be doing it now.
