The Islanders controlled play from the start. Fifteen seconds into the game Lindros roused the large crowd with a hit behind the Panthers net. The Islanders fired nine shots on Fitzpatrick through the first ten minutes. Florida struck with a goal at 10:06 of the opening period, but the Islanders kept hitting, getting scoring chances, and generally playing strong defense. When the second period ended the Islanders were down only 1– 0.9
Between periods Di Fiore had a chance to overcome his pregame gaffe. Three young fans were picked from the crowd to dance with the mascot, allowing Di Fiore to showcase the friendly personality that he constructed for the mascot.10 “Some mascots are obnoxious,” Di Fiore said. “I just said, ‘You know what?’ One, I just wanted to be liked.
I want them to like me and warm up. I just tried to be personable, and that was the difference between me and so many other mascots.”11
The third period was Pálffy’s. At 9:42 he scored a backhanded goal to tie the game. Two minutes later he rocketed a slap shot from the slot past Fitzpatrick to put the Islanders up 2– 1. The score held.
“All I know is, I like it right now,” Pálffy said. Lindros, though kept off the score sheet, made an impact, too. “I didn’t have my greatest game, 23
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but I thought I played well,” Lindros said, giving Islanders fans hope for more to come. “It was a special feeling. It made me feel at home.”12
Opening night had been a mixed bag for the Islanders’ new brand.
Fans booed the mascot, which Newsday labeled “a cross between a fire hydrant and Grizzly Adams,” the bearded California mountain man.13 However, the mascot’s facial hair mattered less than the red light atop his head, which flashed for the Islanders’ two goals. If the fans embraced the 1995 team, the mascot might benefit from association. And the come- from- behind win made for a memorable home opener. The Islanders outshot Florida 39– 18. Lindros backed up the hype. Pálffy had the crowd chanting, “Žiggy!” The rebrand was rocking.
The night after the raucous home opener the Islanders were back in action against the Ottawa Senators, with a chance to win the first two games of a season for the first time since 1987. They didn’t make history, but they left with a 3– 3 tie punctuated by a feel- good goal from Ray Ferraro, whose father had died several weeks earlier from congestive heart failure. Their young goaltender, Jamie McLennan, had his second straight solid start. The Islanders had fired an impressive thirty- nine shots on goal for the second straight night. They had faced two hot goalies and come away with three out of a possible four points. Things were looking up.14
The next game would be crucial. It was one of those dates that fans circle on their calendars, that produces headlines long before the puck is dropped. In their third game in four nights Brett Lindros and the Islanders would face Eric Lindros and the Flyers, the first time the brothers would meet in an organized hockey game. There was little debate about which Lindros was better. Eric was in the starting lineup in the 1994 NHL All- Star Game; Brett wasn’t even in the league back then. Eric centered the Flyers’ top line; Brett was on the Islanders’ second. Eric already had an assist in the young season, giving him 173 NHL points; Brett was still waiting for his first. But the Islanders were selling Brett as the face of the rebrand, and his team had one win and one tie, while Eric’s Flyers had dropped both of their first two games.
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Brett downplayed the sibling rivalry, telling reporters, “You guys will make more of it than there really is.”15
Eric, who already knew how brightly the sports media spotlight could shine, was concerned about the impact on his younger brother.
“The less pressure on him, the better he’ll play,” he said. “He doesn’t need advice. Leave the guy alone.”16
Lacking much star power, the Islanders were desperate to market Brett Lindros, perhaps to the detriment of his development. While Brett was bound to be judged against Eric to a certain degree, Don Maloney encouraged the comparison by claiming that the Islanders had drafted “the better Lindros.” Salivating over his marquee last name, the organization treated Brett as if he were an established star. Less than a month into his first NHL season he was appearing in newspaper ads, dispatched to sign autographs at Sunrise Mall, and splashed across the pages of the team magazine alongside the headline “Nobody’s Little Brother.” The accompanying article slobbered over Lindros as
“the combination of present and future all rolled up in one player,”
liberally dropping phrases like “franchise player” and “exceeded all expectations.” Maloney kept raving. “He brings everything a championship team needs— character, leadership,” he said. “Right now, all he is is big and strong. We think he can develop into more than that.”
Henning, too, appeared to be pushing Lindros to be the scorer that he never was. “The last thing we want him to think is he has to go out there and be tough,” the Islanders’ coach said. “There is much more to Brett’s game than being a tough guy.”17
The game featured a subplot, too. If Brett Lindros was the Islanders’
future, Flyers goaltender Ron Hextall was the past the team desperately wanted to forget. Hextall had been the Islanders’ Swiss- cheese goaltender in the playoff sweep versus the Rangers the previous spring, allowing sixteen goals in three games for a pitiful 6.08 goals- against average and an .800 save percentage. It was a stunning letdown from Hextall’s strong regular season, when he backstopped the Islanders to twenty- seven victories and had a 3.08 goals- against average, the best since his rookie season in 1986– 87. Eager to move past the Rangers series, Don Maloney traded his veteran goalie for the inexperienced 25
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Tommy Söderström, even though Hextall was a rare Islander who wanted to stay. “He mentioned the fans and how I might be their fall guy,” Hextall told reporters. “Well, I’ve been booed before. You’re going to get booed when you are a goaltender. You’d better have a thick skin.”18
The game matched the hype. Hextall heard the boos from the
Nassau Coliseum crowd and played as if he had something to prove.
He responded to the Islanders’ twenty- two- shot barrage in the first period with twenty- one saves. Eric won the battle of the Lindroses, scoring twice, but the Islanders got goals from their top players, Steve Thomas and Pierre Turgeon. Derek King banked a shot in off a Flyers defenseman. McLennan was strong again. With the score tied at 8:29
of the third period, Benoit Hogue was awarded a penalty shot and backhanded the puck past Hextall for a 4– 3 win. The new Islanders had conquered one of the old ones, and they were 2- 0- 1 in a forty-eight- game season.
The team’s early success was a surprise, the sort of fast start that might lead fans to embrace the rebrand. The Newsday game story began,
“Undefeated. Atop the standings. On a roll. The Islanders? Yep.”19
Eric Lindros, nursing a body whacked by his younger brother, brooded after the game. The Flyers seemed destined for their third straight losing season, upsetting their superstar captain. “How frustrating do you think it is?” Lindros said. “It’s like getting drafted by a team that won’t trade you. This is as frustrating as it gets.”20
Eric’s frustration gave Islanders fans hope. For weeks insiders had speculated that Maloney signed Brett for five years to ensure that his contract on Long Island overlapped with the expiration of Eric’s deal in Philadelphia. Eric was sure to attract deep- pocketed suitors when he entered free agency, but only the Islanders would be able to offer him a chance to play with his brother. While signing Brett long term could be viewed as clever planning, it may have also weakened the new brand identity in the short term, giving the impression that the Islanders were holding back on signing marquee players now in hopes of building the franchise around Eric down the line. Long- suffering fans were eager to look forward to Eric as the light at the end of the tunnel. “We never 26
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believed Eric would spend his entire career in the City of Brotherly Love,” declared the Islander Insider newsletter. “Sources inform us that the brothers would love to play together at some point. You can see where we’re heading . . . Long Island is beautiful in the Spring.”21
With the 4– 3 victory the Islanders had shown Eric Lindros that the grass might be greener for him on Long Island. Asked about his kid brother, Eric added dejectedly, “He’s up one- nothing.”22
The Islanders slipped in their next two games, losing on the road to Washington and at home to Tampa Bay. McLennan looked vulnerable in net, and Söderström wasn’t much better. Derek King was benched for taking a double minor penalty that led to a goal. The offense had no punch. For the first time in the season Nassau Coliseum was filled with boos and chants for refunds. Faced with his first losing streak as Islanders coach, Henning called a closed- door meeting and cautioned his players against taking shortcuts. They were about to embark on a four- game, seven- day road trip, and they couldn’t afford to dig their hole any deeper.23
“What separates the good teams from the bad teams is confidence,”
said King, who had gone from the Islanders’ top line in training camp to Henning’s doghouse. “The good teams don’t lose it as many times as bad teams do.”24
Sensing a season- defining moment, Henning sent a message by benching three of his core players, Žiggy Pálffy, Travis Green, and Darius Kasparaitis, for a game against the Panthers in Miami. The team responded with a 5– 1 win.25 Then they flew to Philadelphia to take on the Flyers. The Lindros brothers were not reunited because Brett sat out with a sore wrist. It didn’t matter. The Islanders skated away with a 5– 4 overtime victory that put their record at 4- 2- 1. It was only February, but they were still in first place.26
“There’s a difference in this team from last year and the difference is the guys just don’t seem to panic,” said Ray Ferraro, who had two assists versus the Panthers and the overtime goal against the Flyers.
Added McLennan, “Basically, the guys are just taking the bull by the horns and winning the game.”27
Meanwhile, the Islanders’ marketing staff had not yet picked a 27
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name for the fisherman mascot. McDarby, who designed the character, had privately nicknamed him Salty, an allusion to the saltwater off Long Island’s shores. Newsday proposed Spud. The Islanders ultimately decided to leave the decision to their fans. An issue of the
Blade included a form for a contest to the name the mascot. Alongside McDarby’s sketch the ad encouraged fans, “You can’t body slam the enemy. You can’t pick the players. You can’t kill the ref. But you can name the mascot.” The winner was promised a trip for two to an Islanders road game.28 Entries arrived from across Long Island. One fan proposed Phil D’Net. Another suggested Sam Boni. Some wanted Checkie, Puckie, or Deke.29 But the Islanders were looking for a name that separated them from other hockey teams.
One night a thirteen- year- old girl in Massapequa named Illana Gazes was watching the game in her family’s kitchen when she heard about the contest. She wrote down her choice and asked her mom to mail it in. A few weeks later Gazes received a letter from the Islanders saying that hers was the winning entry. “It was so exciting,” Gazes said. “I felt like a kid in a candy shop because I never won anything. It’s typical. Yeah, you enter a contest and you never win. You play the lotto as much as you can, and you can never win it.” Gazes was one of sixteen fans to suggest a variation of Nyisles (pronounced NIGH- ils), a play on “NY Isles.” Her submission was plucked from a hat as the contest winner, and the Islanders threw in free tickets for an upcoming home game to sweeten the deal.30
Di Fiore did what he could as mascot to endear himself to the fans.
He slid into the net as if he was the puck. He plastered a poster of a swimsuit model against the glass to distract the opposing team. He delivered roses to female fans, switched on his goal light, and placed a hand on his heart like he was in love. “People always remember, Oh, I went to the Islander game, and their mascot, what a goof,” Di Fiore said. “Then I used to always ask people, ‘Hey, when you went to the Nets game, did you see their mascot?’ They’re like, ‘I don’t remember.’”
Still, Di Fiore was limited by the costume. The fifteen- pound head weighed him down, as did the motorcycle battery around his waist that charged the light on the helmet. “I was known as being a hyper 28
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guy,” he said. “In this costume, it was so big, I couldn’t do anything.
It hurt. The head was so heavy. The battery pack around my waist was heavy. It was just dreadful. It wasn’t made out of what most costumes are made out of. The head was this hard plastic, and so it was heavy.
And the body originally was this foamy thing. It was terrible.”31
Nyisles was also confusing. Unveiling the mascot in the shortened season gave the Islanders several months to gauge fans’ reactions to the fisherman brand identity before taking the riskier step of rolling out a radically different logo the following season. Without the context of the fisherman jerseys, however, no one knew what Nyisles was supposed to be. Fans told Di Fiore that he resembled Karl Malden, the character actor who won an Oscar for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire. To the Hockey News, Nyisles looked like a “fire hydrant with facial hair”
or a cross between two hockey personalities, Islanders broadcaster Jiggs McDonald and former Toronto and Calgary right wing Lanny McDonald. “Everybody thought it looked like Jiggs,” said Islanders play- by- play announcer Howie Rose.32
Some fans even brought complaints about the mascot to management. Calabria used to field inquiries about what Nyisles was supposed to be by describing him as “a beachy kind of character” and pointing out that other mascots, most notably the Phillie Phanatic, were of indiscernible species and professions. In response, the fans griped that a beach bum made a bad example for their children. “I really got that,” Calabria recalled. “I said, ‘Really? And what is the name of the New Jersey team?’” Calabria was referring to the New Jersey Devils and their new mascot, N. J. Devil, who was clearly not setting a moral example, but N. J. Devil had a name that was an obvious representation of the Devils’ brand. In crafting the costume for their mascot, the Islanders made a confounding mistake: they did not put his name on the back of the jersey, only a big blue number 0. The winning contest entry was “Nyisles,” and most news media spelled it that way, but some reporters wrote “Nyiles,” and the Islanders themselves printed newspaper ads with a third iteration, “Nyles.”33 It was another touch of confusion that muddled the fisherman brand.
Cracks were starting to show throughout the organization. After 29
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the rousing overtime victory in Philadelphia, the Islanders lost three straight games, putting them at 4- 5- 1 and below .500 for the first time that season. The last of the three was a 5– 2 loss to the undefeated Penguins in Uniondale that had the Islanders’ general manager thinking about breaking up the team. “We can’t put up with this kind of performance on our home ice,” Don Maloney said. “There is something lacking here. We have to do some surgery and get it the hell out of the system.” Off the ice, reports surfaced that the team regretted breaking the bank to sign Lindros, allowing little money left over to re- sign pending free agent Steve Thomas, who had scored forty- two goals the previous season, or sign their first- round draft pick in 1993, Todd Bertuzzi. Losing Thomas or Bertuzzi could be disastrous for a team marketing them as part of the rebrand. Islanders cochairman Stephen Walsh suggested that fans could help pay the players’ salaries by coming to games. Through the first four home dates of the season, Nassau Coliseum was averaging only 11,928 seats sold out of 16,297
available. Still, Walsh maintained the Islanders were “one of the stronger franchises in the league” after refinancing over the summer. “Our goal is
to build a team that’s going to compete for the Stanley Cup year in and year out,” Walsh said. “It’s up to the hockey staff to do that.”34
As February wore on the Islanders’ early- season buzz vanished.
They won one, lost one, tied one, won one, lost one, tied one, lost one.
On one painful night they were defeated in overtime when a puck deflected off the left cheek of defenseman Scott Lachance and into the net, leaving Lachance bloodied and swollen.35 A two- game winning streak at the end of the month put them at a mediocre 8- 8- 3, looking up at the Rangers in the Atlantic Division standings.36 They had given up the first goal in seventeen of eighteen games, including fifteen in a row. A string of injuries ravaged the blue line: Vladimir Malakhov hurt his hip flexor, Dean Chynoweth bruised his knee, Rich Pilon pulled his groin, and Lachance broke a bone in his ankle.37 Then came the biggest blow: sparkplug defenseman Darius Kasparaitis suffered an ACL tear that ended his season.38 Meanwhile, Henning kept juggling lines to spark the offense. At a time of mounting concern about head injuries in professional sports, Lindros, the face of the new brand identity, 30
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missed nine games with a concussion and subsequent headaches.39
When he did play, he didn’t score.40
The Islanders’ inconsistent play, combined with rumors about their inability to re- sign key players, spelled trouble for the new brand identity. Hockey was already fourth among the major sports in the New York market, behind baseball, football, and basketball. Pretty goals and lots of them were the best ways to grab the media’s divided attention, but the compressed NHL schedule ensured that each game meant more.
Instead of taking risks to score highlight- reel goals, teams were embracing a boring defensive strategy called the trap, preventing opponents from scoring by blocking them in the neutral zone and forcing them to dump the puck in. As a result, scoring was down a full goal per game.41
Without marquee players or a winning record, the Islanders, playing in the suburban shadow of the defending Stanley Cup champions, were easy for most of the New York media to ignore.
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