The sports empire of Utah’s Smith Entertainment Group continues to expand, as the company is developing a new training center for the NBA’s Jazz, creating a sports campus in suburban Salt Lake City.
SEG will construct a new practice facility for the team, along with business offices for the broader company, at a 111-acre site it purchased in August 2024 in Sandy, Utah. The forthcoming complex for the Jazz will be adjacent to one it built and opened last month for the NHL’s Mammoth.
The Jazz facility is slated to open sometime in 2027. Costs were not disclosed, but SEG chair and CEO Ryan Smith said it will be “in line” with other modern NBA training complexes that have run as much as $150 million.
“When we first acquired the land in Sandy, putting the Jazz with the Mammoth there was probably at the edge of our thinking,” Smith tells Front Office Sports. “But once we got going on the Mammoth and stood that up, the vision became clear that we could build out a full campus and really create a community. It’s something that really came together organically.”
Like other modern NBA training facilities, the Jazz complex will have multiple courts, state-of-the-art workout and recovery spaces, a “performance kitchen,” and other amenities for player development and cohesiveness. Other influences, however, arrived from Europe, as Smith cited the example of Spain’s Real Madrid, whose complex not only houses training for the LaLiga club but also a series of women’s, lower-division men’s, and youth squads it owns.
SEG’s Sandy campus will operate in parallel to what the company is doing downtown in and around the Delta Center. The arena itself is being retrofitted to more properly stage both basketball and hockey. A larger development plan, meanwhile, will include a sports, entertainment, culture, and convention center district that will include an indoor music venue in partnership with Live Nation, and is mirrored in part by other sports-related destinations such as The Battery in Atlanta.
No decisions have been made about the future of the Zions Bank Basketball Campus, the current Jazz training facility in Salt Lake City.
High Praise
SEG, meanwhile, continues to be lauded by the NHL for its work to establish the Mammoth in its new home. Since the former Arizona Coyotes franchise was relocated, the team continues to sell out every home game, albeit in the still-limited capacity at the Delta Center.
Most recently, the Mammoth introduced its new permanent name and a mascot, Tusky.
“They have done everything right, they’ve done everything first class, and everything they’ve accomplished in the time frame that they’d done it in is nothing short of remarkable,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said last week after a league Board of Governors meeting.
