The franchise has never marketed itself beyond Nassau and Suffolk Counties.
Is Reese Witherspoon suddenly an Islanders fan? The New York Islanders franchise’s minority owner Oliver Haarmann is dating Reese Witherspoon so there may be a reason the actor suddenly has become an Islanders fan. Will there be a celebrity row at Islanders games? Are The Times They Are A-Changin’?
For the first time since the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders began operations in 1971, someone has come up with an idea to expand the business’s Long Island footprint. Let’s see if Queens and Brooklyn are the kind of markets that can be cultivated. The Islanders ownership since day one has always been “we are Nassau County and Suffolk County team” as there are about 2.9 million people in the two counties. The suburbanites against the city slickers.
Kelly Cheeseman, the Islanders president of business operations, wants to break the thinking of the past 54 years. He was a lot of work ahead of him. The Islanders fan base is older and less diverse than most NHL fan bases. It is rooted in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Cheeseman wants a younger crowd featuring more women. He also is looking for more corporate money to buy upscale seats, eat in the arena’s restaurants and pay for valet parking.
In the New York market, at least in traditional media, the thinking has not changed since 1963 when Sonny Werblin purchased the American Football League’s New York Titans franchise, renamed them the Jets, moved to Shea Stadium and signed Joe Namath. The traditional media had Werblin forced down their collective throats and really didn’t like it but the Jets joined the Yankees, Mets and Giants as must cover because of Namath and Shea Stadium’s crowds.
The New York Knickerbockers didn’t even have games broadcasted in full on radio and the traditional media thought there were about 17,000 hockey fans in New York and didn’t play up the Rangers at all. In March, 1967, on the CBS TV game show To Tell The Truth, Gordie Howe and two imposters played the game and one of the panelists, Peggy Cass, knew who Howe was, the other three played the game but Gordie was giving honest answers and two of the panelists correctly guessed who he was.
To a certain extent, the traditional New York media ignores the Islanders, the New Jersey Devils, the Brooklyn Nets, the two Major League Soccer franchises, NYCFC and the Red Bulls, most college football and basketball, tennis and the New York City Marathon.
When the Islanders won four straight Stanley Cups between 1980 and 1983, it was Long Island versus the entire New York market and the team could not compete against the New York Rangers in popularity. The bottom fell out in 1985. The rot started because of a bad lease, an uncaring owner and not looking to go west and market the team in Queens and Brooklyn. If New York City was broken up, Brooklyn would be the United States third largest city and Queens would rank fourth.
Cheeseman has some work ahead of him. “I’m a builder. And we’ve got to grow this fan base here,” he told Newsday, which is a Long Island newspaper. “I look at the market of Long Island as its totality, going from Queens and Brooklyn out to Montauk. I’d say there’s eight million-plus people there. We’re strong, I would call it, from UBS Arena out to Montauk. We’ve got to be better in Queens and Brooklyn to grow the audience. And we’ve got to grow this fan base here.
“We need a stronger, more marketable fan base. We need to become younger, more diverse, more female as quickly as possible to complement the core audience that is really strong with the Islanders. Those are the new audiences that are growing consistently across the National Hockey League. We’re older and less diverse than the NHL.”
The NHL will hold its 2027 All Star Game in the building and it appears that Cheeseman got a great gift in the 2025 NHL draft, Matthew Schaefer, who is talented and appears to have a good personality and that can be marketed. There are some tools in the kit.
The New York Islanders team record was awful for decades and much of that can be blamed on a 30-year lease signed by owner John O. Pickett in 1985 with the arena owner, Nassau County, NY. Pickett’s mistake was giving much of the revenue generated in the building away to Nassau County and the management company running the Nassau Coliseum and signing language that made it almost impossible to relocate the franchise.
Pickett and the National Hockey League signed off on the lease but all seemed fine because Pickett got an enormous cable TV deal from Cablevision’s Charles Dolan. Pickett and Dolan saved the franchise from going under in the late 1970s when Pickett bought the team from Roy Boe and Dolan gave him a pretty good cable TV deal in 1978.
Boe was undercapitalized and never did get financial footing after the National Basketball Association-American Basketball Association deal that allowed Boe’s New York Nets to join the ABA for $3.2 million and also pay a large fee to the New York Knicks for “invading” the Knicks territory. Boe would sell the Nets in 1977 and the team ended up in New Jersey.
Eventually, the Islanders owner Pickett decided to not use the cable TV money for the team and as salaries went up, the Islanders franchise could not compete financially. Pickett withheld the TV money and didn’t want to pay the going rate for players. The arena revenue was not enough to keep the Islanders franchise financially competitive.
Pickett would sell the team to John Spano, a con man who almost pulled off the deal. Spano ended up in jail. Pickett sold the franchise and the cable TV deal to Howard Milstein who tried to invalidate the lease citing safety concerns at the Nassau Coliseum. Milstein even threatened to move the team to Cleveland but couldn’t. He even tried to work out a deal for a new building in the late 1990s but that failed in a dispute over who would do the arena construction.
Milstein sold the team to Charles Wang in 2000.
Wang inherited the lease and lived with it although there was a modification of the lease in 2009 which gave Wang more control of events in the building.
Wang attempted to build an arena-village on the 77 acres of Nassau Coliseum property but was derailed by the Town of Hempstead Supervisor Kate Murray and in 2011 lost a referendum for a new arena.
In 2012, Wang signed a deal to move the franchise to Brooklyn
A bad arena lease can kill a franchise. The move to Brooklyn did not work out because the Brooklyn building was not built for hockey. Wang sold the team to the present ownership group led by Scott Malkin in 2016.
The Malkin-led ownership signed a deal with New York State to build an arena on state owned property by Belmont Park on the Nassau side or the Queens-Nassau border in December 2017. The team went back to the Nassau Coliseum for a year before ending up in Elmont in the Belmont Park complex. The Islanders brass started doing some promotions in Brooklyn but that ended when the team went back to the Nassau Coliseum.
Cheeseman is not going after the New Jersey part of the 20 million people New York market. The Islanders arena is separated from Queens by the Cross Island Parkway. It is that close and not far from the Flushing Meadows sports complex that has the Mets, US Open and soon the NYCFC franchise. It’s a 12 mile trip. Cheeseman is right, there is a huge market that his bosses have missed.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
