Ryan Smith's Ticket Giveaway Boosts Utah Hockey Scene

Watch Ryan Smith's Ticket Giveaway Boosts Utah Hockey Scene - SportsGrid on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Utah Modest 120, the total is five and a half and props to the owner of the Utah Hockey

00:08Club who also owns the, what's his name, Ryan Smith.

00:14He also owns the Utah Jazz Basketball Team.

00:18But I saw today, earlier in the day, he posted online on X, he said, I got 700 tickets to

00:25give away.

00:27First come, first serve, sign up.

00:29And that's pretty cool, right?

00:33The guy gets it.

00:34He's one of the younger owners in professional sports.

00:37And listen, a lot of teams would just basically eat the tickets and say, whatever, dude, we'll

00:40have 700 empty seats.

00:42I don't care.

00:43You know what I mean?

00:44I'm not losing sleep over it.

00:45But he gives away these tickets, and they're trying to sell a sport in Utah.

00:50A lot of people in Utah have never been to a hockey game before, right?

00:54So I like the style, but I also couldn't help but think, because I think it went up to like

00:592,000 tickets he ended up giving away, actually.

01:01Started off with 700.

01:02Then I'm thinking, you know what, you're having a hard time selling tickets.

01:06Because you're not just giving away tickets out of the kindness of your heart here.

01:11You have a lot of tickets that are left on hand.

01:15It's better to give them away and try to get a customer to come back and buy tickets down

01:18the road.

01:20But they're playing well on the ice, whatever.

01:22It's a crappy arena.

01:24It's whatever, it's a basketball arena.

01:26It's not built for hockey.

01:27It's got bad sight lines and stuff like that.

01:29It's not a hockey market.

01:30They just sort of dropped the hockey team in here.

01:33It's doing okay, but they're doing better.

01:35They're doing good on the ice.

01:37Speaking of expansion, they're talking about Atlanta.

01:40I swear to God, man, they'll go to Syria before they put another team in Canada.

01:45They will literally put a team in Baghdad.

01:48Let's go to, you know, they'll be like, yeah, you know what, Iraq is really being put together

01:51again.

01:52The redevelopment of the Gaza Strip.