It’s the Dalai Lama who in the most simple of terms made home seem like heaven, saying: “Home is where you feel at home and are treated well.”

All right, then.

When it comes to sports, when it comes to making Salt Lake City and its surrounding communities feel like home, this place too often in the past has been made to seem not just like a foreign land, but like some kind of hellscape.

Five damning words echoing from three decades back: You. Go. Live. In. Utah.

Hold it right there. That echo may be fading. To quote a Dalai Lama of a different sort, Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a-changin’.”

That’s the good news. Not only are sports and the business of sports flourishing in Utah, but more than a few of the athletes who play those sports, college and pro, seem to like it here just fine, or fine enough, anyway, from Lauri Markkanen to AJ Dybantsa, and others, too. (Everybody gets it: Salt Lake City isn’t Manhattan or South Beach. Free agents aren’t clamoring to get to the Beehive State. National parks aren’t everyone’s thing.)

The place isn’t perfect, far from it. One person’s Zion can be a bit zealous for another. But, as long as the lake doesn’t dry up, the city next to it is growing in population and also growing more and more tolerable and comfortable as a place to find opportunity, to make bank and make a home here — for athletes and the people who cheer for them.

The NBA is here. The NHL is here. MLS is here. NWSL is here. Major League Baseball may be on its way here. Major college sports are here, along with the NIL resources to draw in star players and allow them to thrive.

The bad news is the aforementioned, what’s yet necessary to conquer, what some pro athletes have thought and said about Utah for a long, long time. It’s been a lot to overcome. Utahns, like a lot of residents of other places, care deeply about how they are perceived, what others think and say about them, what others think and say about … you.

You know the tale because some of you, many of you, remember being offended by the way SLC has been swatted away like a double-clutched jump shot; as though the city was a small burg out on the far end of a vast prairie, on the other dusty side of the Wasatch; where milk was delivered in jugs on the back of horse-drawn wagons by men wearing suspenders over plaid shirts; where people were, best case, weirdly religious and, worst case, racist. That may not have been what all athletes thought, but too many of them had more than suspicions.

It reached a point where then-team-owner Gail Miller was moved to stand in front of a Jazz crowd and remind anyone in the building who felt compelled to express racist or other offensive thoughts of any kind to either get out of the Delta Center immediately or they would be escorted out. Maybe that sort of message could be barked out to crowds in most American cities, but that made no decent human feel good about it needing to be said here.

When Derek Harper discovered in 1997 that he was about to be traded from the Mavs to the Jazz, he infamously said to an ESPN reporter … well, you know what he said — the five infamous words.

He later apologized, saying, “My comments were not directed at the people in Salt Lake. It was just taken that way, unfortunately.”

It was never determined with any exactness just how the people in Salt Lake were supposed to take his comments. Like a lot of other places, folks here know their community has its idiots and its flaws, but those folks are proud of where they live, their city and state, and prefer not to be ripped from the outside via criticism that may accurately target some segments, but certainly not everyone or most everyone.

It helped not at all that a few years before that, Denver Nuggets forward Bison Dele (then Brian Williams) almost as infamously said Salt Lake “smelled like brine shrimp,” and he added that he’d rather play in the CBA than in Utah.

Other NBA players, such as Rony Seikaly, declined to show up after being traded to Utah from Miami in 1998 and some around here were miffed by that refusal. Later, it became more specifically clear that his disinclination centered more on the fact that the Jazz wouldn’t fully guarantee the next two years of his contract, worth more than $8 million, a decent amount back then, and the team wanted him to take a physical on account of a stress fracture in his foot. But along with that, there were rumors about Seikaly not embracing the lifestyle switch from Miami to Salt Lake. When Seikaly failed to show up in timely fashion, the deal fell through and the player ended up traded to New Jersey.

More recently, Donovan Mitchell made public that his time in Utah affected him negatively because of backlash he received regarding his standing up for racial equality, social justice, Black history and civil rights while playing for the Jazz. He noted he tired of political pushback from legislators and other misguided leaders, noting also that he knew such pushback was present in other communities, too, not just in Utah.

Somehow, the idea that Salt Lake City was sucking the life out of him, but it wasn’t the only corner of the country that would do that, should have made nobody here feel any better about Mitchell’s Utah experience.

There’s also been other stuff, more lighthearted jokes about the puritan nightlife in the city, jokes that some Utahns were able to laugh off and others defensively figured them to be unfair and untrue.

Now, about that “times-they-are-a-changin’” deal.

Salt Lake is evolving — for the better, in the minds of many, becoming more diverse and inclusive, and for the worse, in the minds of extreme traditionalists who are stuck in the past.

Regarding the sports scene, that, too, appears to be in motion.

It may be faint praise, but in recent surveys of NBA players, a number of NBA locations finished below Utah in places they’d least like the play. As for other leagues, more than a few RSL athletes have said how much they like playing here. Same with Mammoth players, who appreciate more favorable accommodations in Utah.

According to the Sports Business Journal, Salt Lake City recently jumped in its best-sports-cities rankings of over 2,000 U.S. markets from the 44th position in 2023 to No. 12 now. Rather remarkably, it surpassed sports hubs such as Philadelphia and Boston and Denver. Salt Lake’s leap was attributed, at least in part, to the addition of the NHL’s Mammoth, the development of the Power District, which is at the center of Utah’s bid for Major League Baseball, renovations to the Delta Center, and the area’s designation as the host city for the 2034 Winter Olympics.

Criteria used for the ranking relied on “a combination of more than 540,000 data points collected by SBJ’s editorial research team and input from more than 120 executives from across sports business through Feb. 28, 2026.”

Which is to say, the markets were less judged on social issues and trendiness and more on economic metrics and stability in sports, naming categories such as venue capacity, attendance figures, number of pro teams and college programs and a slew of other bits and pieces that would be of interest to business nerds. Executives who work in various sports-related businesses gave their anonymous input.

Maybe it’s a reach, but it could be hoped that where the business of sports is healthy, where it flourishes, that some equally or more important issues can be swept up in improvement as well.

Point is that Salt Lake City, on the whole, is no longer seen as a backwoods settlement where franchises and college programs hang on for dear life, hoping fans will show up and business somehow can be sustained. It’s a place where the interest in sports is ample, where sports and the economic firepower associated with it can and do thrive.

Where that happens, money flows and where money flows, athletes flow, too. Not saying SLC is New York (No. 2) or Los Angeles (No. 6) or Miami (No. 10), but it’s not all that far behind, at least not in SBJ’s ranking.

The No. 1 city, if you were wondering, is judged to be Atlanta. Of all the ranked markets, Salt Lake City made the biggest leap.