Utah Mammoth hire Andrew Agozzino as Tucson Roadrunners assistant coach

The Utah Mammoth added retired forward Andrew Agozzino as an assistant coach with the Tucson Roadrunners, giving their AHL affiliate a voice that spent 847 regular-season games inside the league it is now trying to shape. For a club that treats Tucson as a key part of its pipeline, the hire is about more than filling a staff seat.

Agozzino replaces Zack Stortini on head coach Steve Potvin’s staff after Stortini left last month for a head coaching job with New Mexico in the ECHL. Agozzino announced his retirement earlier this week, then stayed in the organization and moved directly into coaching with the Roadrunners. Utah described him as a retired forward who will remain with the organization.

That background matters because Agozzino is not coming from a distant level of the game. He has lived the AHL schedule, the roster churn and the constant movement between depth role and NHL consideration that defines life in the minors. Tucson now has a coach who has seen those pressures from the player side and can translate them for prospects trying to earn trust, earn special-teams work and make themselves reliable enough for a call-up.

Utah has been clear about how central Tucson is to the franchise’s future. In its own team coverage, the Mammoth framed the Roadrunners as crucial for creating Utah’s future and pointed to a statistic from TheAHL.com that 87% of NHL players in the 2023-24 season had appeared in AHL action at some point. That number captures why a coach with Agozzino’s mileage carries real value: the gap between being organizational depth and becoming an NHL option often runs straight through the American Hockey League.

For Potvin, the addition gives Tucson a staff member who can connect immediately with players facing the same questions Agozzino once had to answer himself. For Utah, it keeps a former Mammoth forward inside the organization and turns his playing career into a development resource. In a league where the next injury, the next promotion and the next opening on the depth chart can change everything, that kind of firsthand AHL knowledge is a practical edge.