The New York Islanders - Victims of their Own Success

These young fans either like to tailgate conveniently (you can't tailgate at Rangers games) or they're what's left of a fan base that should never have existed in the first place.

When the Islanders limp out of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the end of the 2014-15 season for what their owner believes will be more the prosperous confines of Brooklyn, it will mark the end of the longest fade of a professional sports team in history. A fade to black, more like blue and orange, that began as far back as before the first puck was dropped for their first game back in 1972.

 

Much of the Islanders problems over the last quarter century have, wrongly, been centered on the team's very humble home, the Nassau Coliseum.

 

The "Islanders" fade to black beginning before the first puck of their first game because the team never made any sense. Established to block the long defunct World Hockey Association from gaining a toe hold in the New York metropolitan area, their biggest problem has been that they play in the middle of Nassau County, not exactly a hotbed of NHL fans. Say what you will; outside of Canada and say Detroit, Boston and Chicago, is any city in the United States a hockey hotbed? 

 

With the move to Brooklyn, there is little chance this will never happen again seeing that if the Islanders win the Stanley Cup in the future, the celebratory parade won't be on Long Island. Not that it matters, Islanders fans being fickle and sparse. As Steve Jacobsen has pointed out, if Long Island really cared about the Islanders they wouldn't be leaving.

With the Rangers home less than twenty five miles west, the Islanders had to carve out a fan base from the Ranger's fan base; the Islanders' original owner, Roy Boe having to pay the Rangers $5 million dollars in territorial fees when the team first launched to offset losses in revenue. With a uniquely localized team identity, if you're not from Long Island why would you be a fan of a team called the Islanders -  (?), in addition to the limited appeal of hockey, to have a chance at surviving  the Islanders best bet was to quickly become more competitive than the Rangers. They did that and so much so that they became a victim of their own success; had they never had that success early on the franchise wouldn't have remained on Long Island as long as it did.

Enigmatic, polarizing, and the most important player on a team of remarkably strong players, Denis Potvin is without question one of the best players in NHL history if not its greatest  defenseman.

The Islanders came of age  in the mid 1970's taking many disgruntled, Long Island based Rangers fans with them when the Rangers were in a foggy rebuilding flux (some things never change). Their rapid assent from door mat to contender seeming like a rebirth of the Yankees of yore as opposed to an expansion team. When they stopped winning, however, those "loyal" fans, again,  many of them being disenfranchised Rangers fans, as the Islander's ever astute GM Bill Torrey had feared, stopped showing up en masse. Mr. Torrey having no idea, of course, of how long the losing would be.

Butch Goring, Potvin and Bryan Trottier with first of four Stanley Cups won consecutively between 1980 and 1983. No major league sports team has won as many consecutive titles since.

As remarkable as the team was early on, they have been consistently and remarkably lousy for way longer than they were good. In the twenty five years since the retirement of Denis Potvin in 1988, they've made the playoffs a mere 8 times and have advanced past the second round only once. Conversely, during their first 16 years in the league, save for their first two seasons, they made the playoffs 14 years in a row to say nothing about their four straight Stanley Cup wins.

Bob Nystrom scored the overtime goal that made Rangers fans cry. It gave the Islanders their first Cup in game five of the 1980 finals against the Flyers.

Blame an NHL changed through multiple lockouts and strikes making it difficult for smaller market teams (Long Island is a large market but it might as well be Indianapolis) to be built the way the championship Islanders were built, farcical ownership changes, bizarre decisions and a bankrupt Nassau County all plying against the organization's chances of putting a consistently good team on the ice. You can't blame the fans for staying away.

The future of the Coliseum is in doubt. Most likely, since it's in the middle of one of the most densely populated and wealthy areas of the country, it will be demolished to make way for office parks, shopping malls and residences.

Will the Islanders, find the financial resources they never had on Long Island when the move to Brooklyn next year? Anyone's guess. One thing is for certain, if they don't win, win consistently and win quickly once in Brooklyn, regardless of what the team is called,  fans there will be even more ambivalent towards them than the ones they leave behind. The Islanders will fade to black again. 

The fact that the team, at last report, will retain the name "Islanders" after they move being another odd footnote in a team's history that has been nothing if not unusual. A team name that so aptly if benignly now describes their fan base will soon be completely at odds with the identity of where they will be playing. Understand that Brooklyn, while on the same land mass as Long Island, is not, oddly enough, considered part of Long Island. So, the "Islanders" being called "Islanders" in Brooklyn makes as much since as calling them "Islanders" if the team had moved to Cleveland.