Barrett Hayton ends the Utah Hockey Club's home problems with a late game-winning goal

SALT LAKE CITY Perhaps Friday will finally change the fortunes of the Utah Hockey Club.

At the start of Friday's match, Club had not won a regular match on its own field for almost two months. Yes, the team celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas, Boxing Day (hey, most of them are Canadian) and New Year's, but no regular win at the Delta Center.

That changed against the San Jose Sharks.

Barrett Hayton scored with 1:32 left in the game to lift Utah to a 2-1 victory on home ice. The Hockley Club had won just once in its previous ten home games (an overtime victory over Vancouver).

The team now has a total of six wins at the Delta Center, which is the fewest home wins in the NHL. Coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally?) the Utah Jazz, who have won just twice at home this season, also have the worst home record in the NBA.

So much for the Delta Center's alleged home field/ice advantage.

And yes, the Utah Hockey Club has felt a little extra burden of performing in front of their home fans as the losses have piled up.

“The narrative around the team and our home situation and all that, we put unnecessary pressure on ourselves,” head coach André Tourigny said. “And that showed a little bit, not a little bit, in our performance.”

Especially early as San Jose stepped up to the plate before many fans had even sat down after the national anthem.

Fabian Zetterlund scored less than a minute into the game, putting Utah in an early hole. If there wasn't pressure before the game, there certainly was then.

The Club has been able to point to the small losses for the Stanley Cup candidates against Florida, Colorado, Dallas and Minnesota as a silver lining for the home battle. But the Sharks are far from a Cup contender; heck, they're far from a playoff contender.

That, Tourigny believed, only made achieving a positive result even more difficult.

“We're putting a lot of pressure on ourselves,” he said. “We were moving, like we were trying to make a good play. And when you play against the Stanley Cup champions, you don't think about those things; you just play with urgency.”

So it was far from a clean game, but Utah showed enough resilience to break through.

Nick Schmaltz scored his seventh goal of the season in the second period to tie the game, paving the way for Hayton's late-game winner.

“I think we've had a lot of one-goal games where we just haven't been able to capitalize on that last one or just make some scoring plays,” Hayton said. “So yeah, that's a huge one. Obviously, this is a big home standard for us; we need to take advantage of it.”

But even after Hayton's goal, Utah couldn't really breathe a sigh of relief.

Kevin Stenlund was called for a four-minute high-sticking double-minor with 55.6 seconds left, giving the Sharks a power play (and the potential of a second power play if they scored). Oh, and Stendlund, one of Utah's best penalty killers, was in the box.

Gulp.

However, Alex Kerfoot made a great play with his stick to get the puck out of the San Jose zone, essentially clinching the win.

“Hey, we're in the entertainment business,” Tourigny joked as he walked into his post-match press conference.

But more seriously, he thought the game was part of his team's growth.

“We want to create that relationship with our fans. We want to win. We want to compete in the race, we want to climb the rankings and all those things,” he said. “So that brings a lot of pressure internally and externally; and for all these reasons I think this is a good learning experience and a good building block.”

The team still has five home games as part of a seven-game home stretch, a stretch that could make or break the season. Has the pressure been relieved after the win?

“We will have the answer in about 20 hours,” Tourigny said.

Key points for this article were generated using large language models and reviewed by our editorial staff. The article itself is written solely by humans.

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