After 17 seasons in the NHL, two Stanley Cups, and playing for eight different teams, Ian Cole is reaching the twilight of his hockey career. He’s won big, scored some massive goals, and has had a long career in the NHL. At 35 years old, he could retire and no one would blame him. However, after a playoff run with the Vancouver Canucks, he’s decided to take his talents to the young Utah Hockey Club, citing the potential of the team as the main reason why he signed.
Young Talent Is Appealing
Last season with the Canucks, Cole played the Arizona Coyotes three times in what would be their final season in franchise history. Although his team took down the Coyotes two of those times, the defenseman guarded talent like Clayton Keller, Logan Cooley, and Dylan Guenther. He saw the elite young talent they had and knew the team was on the way up.
“When I look at the roster, I look at the potential that I think it has,” Cole said. “It’s a team that lost 14 games in a row last year down in Arizona. Let’s say you go .500 in those 14 games though. You’re at least within reach of one of the playoff spots. It’s a team that has a lot of potential and it’s a team that when I play against that team, you keep to yourself and say this is actually a really good team. It’s a team that can be very good in the future.”
It’s worth mentioning the 14-game losing skid the Coyotes went on was amid Alex Meruelo and Gary Bettman beginning discussions to relocate the team’s hockey operations to Salt Lake City. Now, there’s no more news like that, and Utah’s roster has no outside noise to keep them from reaching their full greatness.
Cole has played with a handful of great players. Last season with the Canucks, he played with a young core that featured Quinn Hughes, Elias Pettersson, JT Miller, Thatcher Demko, and Brock Boeser who made their first impact in the playoffs. With the Tampa Bay Lightning, he played with a Stanley Cup-winning core of Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, Andrei Vasilevskiy, and Brayden Point who had won back-to-back Cups and had been to three straight Stanley Cup Finals upon Cole’s arrival. He sees a bit of both of those teams in Utah.
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“I have been fortunate today to have been on a wide array of teams in terms of very successful and veteran-heavy teams like Tampa, and then teams that are very young and still finding their way like Vancouver last year,” Cole said. “There are similarities between the two in terms of the type of personnel that you have. There are a lot of differences too. In terms of looking back last year at Vancouver, there are a lot of similarities and a lot of parallels that I could make to this Utah team. There’s some high-end elite talent up front. There’s some great defenseman, a really solid goaltender, and a lot of really great support pieces there as well. I think it’s a team that I’m very excited to join and a team that I look at and think we can make some noise here this year.”
Cole has also played on Stanley Cup-winning teams earlier in his career. With the Pittsburgh Penguins, he won back-to-back Cups in 2016 and 2017. That core featured veteran players like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, and Chris Kunitz. However, it also had younger talent who fused well with the established core like Jake Guentzel and Matt Murray. It’s a model of a team that Cole sees shades of in Utah.
“There’s a lot of great players on this Utah team,” Cole said. “There were a lot of great players on that team. In terms of bonafide superstars in the prime of their careers, you had Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, and Marc Andre Fleury. I think what really separated that team and gave us a boost was a lot of the young talent that came in and infused their identity and their speed into that lineup with those elite players. I’m not gonna go out and say that we have a Sidney Crosby on this team here in Utah but I do think that there are a lot of really talented players. In kind of that same thought process with Pittsburgh, there needs to be young guys and support players that come in and can support those guys and help fill in that framework around those very talented elite players.”
That’s high praise for a Utah team whose core hasn’t made the playoffs since 2020 as the Coyotes. However, if anyone knows a talented team, it’s Cole. He’s played on teams with players like Crosby, Stamkos, Nathan MacKinnon, Sebastian Aho, and Kirill Kaprizov. He has made the playoffs every single season in his career since 2014. It’s a winning presence that Cole has and he’s excited to bring it to a young Utah team.
No Convincing Needed
Cole didn’t need a lot of convincing to sign with Utah. He already has some family that lives there which he’s excited for. He’s also heard quite a bit about the state’s beautiful outdoor scene as many have along with the city life.
“I didn’t need a ton of convincing,” Cole said. “It wasn’t something that I needed to get told how great it is. It’s something that I could view from the outside and see the team and see the city and see the potential and just be really excited for it.”
Cole also sees a lot of fun in the team being in an expansion city, meaning this will be the first time Utah residents will get to see their new hockey team play. He’s heard about the amount of hype there is from the new fanbase and is excited to play in front of them.
“I think the idea of being on a team that’s in a city for the first time and getting to experience that will be very fun,” Cole said. “It’ll be a very interesting and fun experience, especially one that very clearly in Utah has seemingly embraced it with open arms. When I was on the phone with some of the guys in the front office after the signing, they said there were like 12,000 people coming to the development scrimmage. If nothing else, it’s seemingly a very rabid fan base that is likely to embrace this team with open arms. It’s really hard to not be excited for a situation like that.”
There are a lot of things that Cole is looking forward to about joining Utah. He’s seen and heard great things about the team from new teammates who he’s played with in other markets like Alex Kerfoot and Nick Bjugstad. He knows this core has great potential and sees similarities between them and the winning teams he’s been on. He also gets to reunite and live closer to family. For Utah, Cole will help rebuild their blue line with fellow newcomers Mikhail Sergachev and John Marino. The veteran defenseman has been around the league on numerous teams in recent years but it seems like in Utah, it could be a match made in heaven for both the player and the team.
