‘The expectation needs to be to win the Cup here’: Mammoth raising sights for next season after playoff exit

After bidding their playoff beards adieu, each Utah Mammoth player met with the media Sunday, one by one, to evaluate the season and give a glimpse of what the future holds.

History suggests that although everyone on an expiring contract stated a desire to return next season, not all of them will — that’s the business side of the game. But a common theme among virtually everyone is how much promise the team has.

“The potential for this group is — right now, there’s just no reason not for us to think that we can win the (Stanley) Cup,” said MacKenzie Weegar, a veteran defenseman whom the team acquired at the trade deadline.

“I think the belief for the group at the beginning of the year was to make the playoffs and to kind of see what could happen. Now, I believe that we have the potential to win the Cup.”

After a quarterfinal exit in the group’s first playoff appearance since the pandemic as Arizona Coyotes and first since the inception of the new franchise in Utah, there’s still plenty of work to be done. But with how close each playoff game was except perhaps the last, combined with the constant improvement of the team’s young core, it’s not unrealistic to expect the Mammoth’s Cup-contention window to open soon.

“The standard’s obviously high. The expectations are really high. We’ve got to know that it’s really hard. … But we’re going to get better,” Weegar said.

Mikhail Sergachev, who is only 27 years old but already has two Stanley Cup rings to his name, hesitated to draw direct comparisons to the Tampa Bay Lightning, where he gained the bulk of his experience, but he does think the team is heading in a positive direction.

“I think we have the right pedigree on the team and the leadership group and the core, the whole team,” he said. “You know, starting with our owner and going down, I think everybody wants to win here.”

Ian Cole, another two-time Stanley Cup champion and a veteran who has made the playoffs with all nine of his NHL teams to date, agreed with Sergachev that building a contender is not as simple as drawing lines from his 2016 and 2017 Cup-winning Pittsburgh Penguins teams to this one.

But he agrees that the bar needs to be set higher.

“I think we’re beyond the point of like, ‘Hey, we’re just going to try to make playoffs,’” he said. ”No. We need to make playoffs, put ourselves in a good position to win the Stanley Cup. That being said, there’s a lot of things that go into winning the Stanley Cup.”

How can the Utah Mammoth become Stanley Cup contenders?

Only one team gets to win the Cup in a given season, and as Cole said, there are plenty of uncontrollable factors that can sway the final result of a series. But the Mammoth’s goal is to put themselves in the best possible position for success.

Step 1 was to make the playoffs, which Sergachev says helped them in terms of both development and evaluation.

“It meant a lot to us to see where we’re at and how we’ve developed into a playoff team,” he said. “Now, we’ve just got to go from from there and stack series after series and try to win them all.”

The amount of responsibility, both offensively and defensively, that Logan Cooley and Dylan Guenther took in the playoffs should encourage Mammoth fans. It’s not a given that young stars will be difference makers in their first playoff runs, but those guys lived up to the challenge.

“It was great getting in the playoffs, get that taste definitely could build off it going into next year,” Cooley said.

The next step needs to involve making a deep playoff run. It doesn’t necessarily need to happen next year — teams often have to lose in the first round a few times before having ultimate success — but giving the kids a taste of what it takes to win would be highly beneficial.

“The expectation needs to be to win the Cup here,” Weegar said. “That needs to be the belief, and I believe that the guys in the room believe that as well. It’s not just playoffs now, it’s to hoist that Cup here.”