Course Correction
In which it's discovered that Ryan Smith hated the idea of me becoming a Sonics fan.
I don’t think Ryan Smith subscribes to this newsletter, but I can’t be sure that he doesn’t at least read it. Maybe he checks it from a burner account—because Smith is 100% the kind of guy with a burner account.
Side Note: Burner accounts being outed is one of my favorite internet news stories. Kevin Durant fucking LOVES burner accounts. Bryan Colangelo resigned as GM and President of Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers after people learned he’d been using a burner account for years to defend his giant collars.
Now back to Ryan Smith. He’s a smart guy. I don’t really like praising billionaires, but you don’t get that rich by being an idiot. It usually takes a while for their brain to rot from never-ending praise, and no one around to check their dumb ideas. Ryan Smith isn’t there quite yet*.
*There’s a great scene in the show THE OTHER TWO, where Brooke goes on a date with a modestly rich guy because the billionaire she dated previously was weird as hell. While she’s in the bathroom, the guy gets a phone call that his company has been acquired or something, and he instantly becomes an eccentric billionaire. She gets back to the table, and he’s a completely different person, climbing the walls of the restaurant for an adrenaline rush to go along with his freshly botoxed face. It’s incredible, and what I picture most absurdly rich people are like.
Anyway, Smith still has a ways to go before that happens (officially anyway), and right now he’s still got the guile to pull off a long con. A few months ago, everyone (including me) was mad at him because it looked increasingly likely that he was going to move the Jazz down south to the new Point of the Mountain development. Turns out that was all a clever ruse so that he wouldn’t have to pay for the whole entertainment district downtown by himself. One thing I learned from years of serving tables is that the only goal of rich people is to stay rich. That means using any and every trick at their disposal, which mostly boils down to getting other people to pay for things for you (and tipping like shit while using Groupons, but that’s another topic).
Over the past few months it’s become a little (maybe even a lot) more realistic that Utah will be getting both an MLB team and an NHL team, in addition to keeping the Jazz. It’s also almost guaranteed that all three teams will be playing downtown. As a guy who loves wandering around downtown on foot between May and November, this is great news for me. As a guy who will be in his late-40s by the time all these tentative plans come to fruition, this is still good news, but less exciting. Am I still going to be a #SingleSuccessfulGuy wandering the streets of Salt Lake listening to music in my headphones out of boredom by then? I mean, if history is any indicator, it’s pretty likely.
The main thing I want to talk about here is the photo that Ryan Smith Tweeted out. Here it is.
I’ve been thinking about this for like a week and a half now. I have so many questions. The main one being: Where is this? Really. Where downtown is this? If they rebuild the Delta Center (the same arena that they just finished remodeling a couple of years ago), and keep it in the same place, what vantage point is this rendering from?
Let’s think about this. On the back side of 400 West is the Gateway mall, running a full city block, with the Union Pacific building—that’s in the middle of a huge remodel to add a hotel—directly across the street to the west. The TRAX line runs to the north and west of the arena. Right across the street to the east and going up to West Temple is the Salt Palace Convention Center. There’s an enormous new condo/apartment building on the corner of 100 South and West Temple. Between that and 200 West on 100 South is what’s left of Japan Town. There’s a new hotel, and more condos/apartments across the street to the south.
I have no idea where or how this design works, and neither does anyone else. Best guess? They’re going to tear down the Salt Palace (again) so that we can have this view.
A few other things to note, as well. Now, I’m all for the pedestrian plaza that leads to the revamped arena, but 75% of Jazz fans are going to throw a huge fit if they can’t drive their lifted truck directly to the front door. They will not be pleased if they have to walk.
You’ve got to kind of admire the adversarial relationship between the city and UTA on display lately. City leaders keep trying to make Salt Lake a more walkable place, easily accessible for people to navigate without cars. UTA execs, on the other hand, refuse (and in some cases drastically cut) expanded service because doing so would probably affect their year-end bonus checks.
Look at 2nd south between 7th east and State Street. That was like a two-year construction project, and in the end they took away two lanes of traffic, and all the street parking to add dedicated bus lanes running east and west. They didn’t add more buses running up and down that street, but they did make it harder for me to park anywhere near Urban Lounge when I want to see a band play.
Did you also notice that for some reason there’s a Hard Rock Cafe as one of the restaurants below a gigantic building that’s not built yet? We had one of those already and no one cared. The building that it was in is still currently empty. There’s also three different screens and digital billboards right there, which would be kind of cool if they showed the games so people who can’t afford tickets can still be part of the action. Do I think they’ll actually do that? For late round playoff games, maybe. Maybe.
It honestly looks like someone took early concept art from the T-Mobile arena in Vegas, changed a few things around, and told Smith to share it, hoping that no one would notice. It may have worked, too! The only things I’ve seen about it online are people excited that the Jazz are staying downtown, and that the Phoenix Coyotes will probably relocate up here, and be the Utah Ice* or something like that.
*Smith was on TV a while ago talking about getting a hockey team, and one of his suggestions for team names was the Utah Yetis so that the logo would be a cool, conjoined U and Y—uniting Salt Lake and Provo. My eyes almost rolled out of my head.
The renderings for the MLB field on the west side were also revealed, but that one raised way fewer questions—aside from maybe the little riverwalk part.
It looks pretty carefully planned out, and Building Salt Lake did a cool overlay of that area from a Google Map standpoint. You can see exactly where it is, what’s there now, and what they hope to make it into. I’m still pretty skeptical on Utah’s ability to support a baseball team, but the Miller family seems hellbent on getting one. There’s also a pretty intense battle to lure the Oakland A’s here to play while their new stadium in Vegas is being built. The Miller family is trying to get their new Daybreak stadium built in time for them to play the 2025 season, while SLC Mayor Erin Mendenhall is trying to get them interested in playing at Smith’s field instead.
The Vegas stadium won’t be ready until 2028, and they still have a lease on the Oakland Coliseum for 2024. I expect we’ll hear more towards the end of summer—especially if things don’t go well in Oakland. The city would probably like to keep the team as long as possible, but the owners seem pretty determined to get out of there as soon as the season ends this fall. Salt Lake might be an attractive candidate for everyone involved, and could use it as something of a pilot program to see if an expansion team would be feasible. That could also backfire though, since the A’s are terrible. Who wants to watch a terrible team play 81 times a year? Especially in April, when it’s randomly like 30 degrees and snowing for a few days.
At least when the Jazz are bad you get to be inside.
But maybe the new Delta Center will have a retractable roof? I mean, why else are there fireworks above the arena in that drawing?