We Want Fish Sticks
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We had beat them in five games but they had a very good team.”75
While the Islanders salivated at placing Schneider on the decimated blue line, they clearly viewed Muller as the centerpiece of the deal.
After speculation that Turgeon and Malakhov were disillusioned and perhaps intentionally tanking on Long Island, the franchise looked for Muller to lead his younger teammates by example.
“We have to get people to play every night,” Maloney said.76
The Islander Insider assured, “He will show up every night.”77
It turned out to be a poor choice of words. Muller didn’t come to play for the Rangers game. He wasn’t even in the country.
Before the game the beat reporters were waiting in the corridor outside the Islanders’ locker room, hoping to interview Muller and Schneider. The team’s media relations director, Ginger Killian Serby, returned with just one of them. “All of a sudden Ginger comes walking along with Matty Schneider,” said Islanders television broadcaster Stan 39
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Fischler. “Where the hell’s Muller? And of course it was embarrassing.
The guy wasn’t there. Why didn’t he show? What the hell’s the matter with this guy? What kind of pro are you?”78
The reasons for his conspicuous absence varied. Muller claimed that he needed time to get his visa approved. The press speculated that he was upset that the exchange rate between Canada and the United States would reduce his salary. Offering yet another excuse, Maloney said that Muller wanted to take care of “personal matters,”
implying that he was recovering from the shock of leaving the Canadiens, who promised that he wouldn’t be traded. Maloney, a former player, professed to understand Muller’s situation. “He’s the captain of the Canadiens,” he said. “He wears that on his sleeve. That’s why we got him. I empathize with him. We’ve all gone through this before.”79
Initially, the players were sympathetic, too. Schneider was quick to explain the different circumstances facing himself and Muller at the time of the trade. “For me, it was a reset button,” Schneider said. “I hit the reset button and I was excited. For Kirk, he was at a different stage in his career. It meant something a lot different for him. He was the captain of Montreal. His family was embedded in the community.
I think it caught him by surprise. At the time, I had asked for a trade and he was happy in Montreal.”80
Without Muller the Islanders played the Rangers down a forward and were losing 2– 0 seven minutes into the game. But they struck back before the first period was through. During his first shift on the power play, Schneider swatted a clearing attempt and passed to defense partner Bob Beers, who shot the puck behind the Rangers’ Mike Richter for the Islanders’ first goal of the night. After two more periods of back- and- forth play, the undermanned Islanders narrowly escaped with a 4– 3 victory that plunged the Rangers three games below .500.81
The next day the Islanders should have been basking in their triumph for supremacy in New York hockey. Instead, they awoke to headlines about Muller’s absence. “Trade Upsets Muller,” Newsday reported. The wordier Times went with “Muller Keeps Islanders Waiting for Now.”
The Daily News made a Star Trek reference and blared, “Kirk Tells Isles: Beam Me Up Later.” The Post was more pointed. “GUTLESS”
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appeared in huge type on the back page, leading to a story headlined
“Distraught Muller May Retire Rather than Report.” The article quoted the Islanders’ Derek King, one of the best- liked players in the locker room, assuring a reporter that Muller would show up. “He’ll be here,”
King said. “You’ll see.” The Islanders were about to play for the second time in two days, a Saturday- night game against the Panthers. It should have been Muller’s home debut as an Islander. Instead, it was another no- show.82
The Islanders were quickly losing patience. They had taken a risk by trading a twenty- five- year- old first- line center for a twenty- nine-year- old second- line center based on the hope that he would serve as a role model for their young players. Now he wouldn’t even report.
Calabria called the situation “very embarrassing.” Lest anyone think that Muller did not want to play for a last- place team, Maloney tried to clarify that Muller was upset about “being traded, not being traded to the Islanders, just being traded.” But his prolonged absence gave the impression that respectable NHL players did not want to play for a faltering Islanders franchise. “Muller was a fiasco,” said Islanders radio broadcaster Barry Landers. “Players didn’t see the Islanders or Long Island, unfortunately, as a place that they wanted to play in.”83
The day after the Panthers game Muller finally arrived on Long Island. At an awkward press conference at Nassau Coliseum he explained that he needed a few days after the trade to get his “head clear.” Infuriatingly, the player who had just missed two games proclaimed with a straight face, “My asset is I come to play every night.”
His words did little to quell speculation that he did not want to be an Islander. Muller’s delay transformed the narrative of a gutsy trade for a veteran player who had captained his team to a Stanley Cup two years earlier. The Daily News put him “on probation,” and the Post tasked him with living up “to the billing he failed to establish while in seclusion.”84
Maloney did his part to reignite excitement for the trade. “I think Kirk will give us another little jumpstart,” he said. “If we’re going to go down, we’re going to go down with a fight.”85 A few nights later against the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Islanders exhibited feistiness in Muller’s Islanders debut, which was also the first NHL game for 41
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top goaltending prospect Tommy Salo. Steve Thomas and Mathieu Schneider were involved in a second- period melee that showed the Islanders still had some competitive spirit. However, true to Maloney’s comments, they went down with the fight, losing 5– 2. Their already improbable playoff push was on the verge of becoming mathematically impossible. Henning called another postgame meeting to ream out his club. Muller said that his new teammates were “all hurting inside.”86
The only consolation was the schedule. Mercifully, the Islanders had just eleven games left.
As the Islanders descended into the NHL basement, the development of their new jerseys was wrapping up. SME had originally proposed evolving the original Islanders logo or replacing it with text- only wordmarks. The Islanders resisted. The Ducks and the Sharks had their success with cartoon logos, not wordmarks. Besides, the Islanders wanted to evoke Long Island’s maritime culture. McDarby came up with a character that looked like the Roman sea god Neptune bran-dishing a hockey stick with a trident on one end, but the team wanted a human figure akin to the baymen from the “Downeaster Alexa” music video. SME’s designers sketched dozens of potential characters. Some were gruff. Others were jovial. One had smoke curling up from a pipe in his mouth.87
After months of deliberations the Islanders selected a design drawn by Andrew Blanco, an illustrator from Venezuela. When Blanco joined SME in 1990, he spoke broken English and lacked a college degree or formal training, and he was tasked with odd jobs. Eight months into his time at SME Blanco got his break when he created a design for a classical music station that the client liked, and he began working on sports brands, including the Islanders.88 Keeping with the “Downeaster Alexa” imagery, Blanco sketched an older man holding a hockey stick with both hands, his body cut off at the waist by “ISLANDERS” in all caps. The man looked to be in his sixties. He sneered so that only a sliver of teeth was visible on the right side of his mouth, framed by a gray beard. He wore a teal slicker and an oilskin rain hat known as a sou’wester. Behind him was a hockey goal.
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The Islanders’ initial reaction to the fisherman logo is murky. The logo must have had a patron within the organization, or else
it would never have been chosen. However, several team executives who attended meetings to choose the new logo have denied or downplayed their roles in its ultimate selection. They may be wary of admitting any culpability, or at least complicity, in a historic sports- branding debacle.
“As one of my old bosses said to me, ‘Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan,’” said Fred Scalera, then the vice president of licensing for NHL Enterprises. “When something works, everybody wants to step up and say, ‘Oh, I was involved in that. And I did that. And I did that.’ But when something doesn’t work, they either blame somebody else or they want to tell you that they weren’t involved.”89
No individual was portrayed as the fisherman logo’s benefactor in period accounts of the rebranding process. However, several participants in the logo meetings recalled that Islanders cochairman Stephen Walsh, one of the minority owners, set the tone by voicing his approval for the design on the behalf of ownership, an account supported by contemporary sources.90 According to the participants, Walsh’s blessing gave the impression that ownership had no appetite for other suggestions. “He did the Khrushchev banging the shoe on the podium and said, ‘No. If we’re gonna do this, we’re all in or we’re not doing it at all,’ so options were not an option,” said Tim Beach, the Islanders’ director of game events. “Of course, when you’re in a room with one of the owners who is responsible whether you get a raise or not, or whether you keep your job or not, no one’s gonna stand up in the room and say, ‘Absolutely not.’” As an outsider, Ed O’Hara, the SME founder, feared that ownership’s approach would chill any critical examination of the logo. “When the owner comes in and says, ‘Don’t you like this?’ and the employee says, ‘Yes, boss, I do,’ I don’t think it was a properly run research process. To call it
‘process’ is overstating what it was.” Walsh has never publicly provided his version of events. In 2014 he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for committing fraud at a commodities- trading firm, and his incarceration and tarnished reputation may have emboldened the meeting participants to finger him as the logo’s benefactor. Walsh 43
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did not reply to a letter sent during the research for this book to the correctional facility where he resides.91
Besides Walsh, the Islanders’ executive most involved in the rebrand was Pat Calabria. Calabria acknowledged the perception that the fisherman logo was “a whole Pat Calabria production,” since he hired the firm that created it and has been unapologetic in his support of its selection. “Trying to be as objective about it as possible, I fail to see what was hideous about that logo,” Calabria said. However, he was only one member of a committee that recommended the logo to ownership. “Anybody who was there knows that this was a process,”
he said. “I didn’t decide.”92
With Walsh and Calabria behind the logo there were few voices in the organization with enough influence to deter them. The Islanders’ majority owner, John Pickett, was represented in some meetings late in the process by his son Brett, who grew up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, just fifteen minutes from Nassau Coliseum. Brett Pickett was ten years old when his father took control of the team in 1978 and a teenager during the Stanley Cup run. For a man who described himself as bleeding blue and orange, the teal- and- silver fisherman logo came across as “goofy- looking” and “minor league.” Hoping to save the Islanders’ original crest, the younger Pickett wrote a lengthy letter to Walsh and the other three minority stake owners who ran day- to- day operations. “I think the crux of it was that Islander fans derive their identity as Long Islanders more than anything from the Islanders’
championship past,” Pickett said. “Not just the Islanders happen to be located on Long Island and therefore potentially symbolized by a fisherman or some other local culture point, but the Islander fans drew their identity from the championship history, and I think those guys missed that. I think they were trying to connect them to a place, and instead they should have connected them to that timeless concept of those Stanley Cup championships and all the pride that they and their parents drew from that era in the Islanders history. Disconnecting from that was suicide.”
Pickett’s concerns made little impact. Despite his apparent place in the line of succession of Islanders ownership, he had no official role in 44
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the organization and used his background as an attorney to represent the Islanders only in legal matters, not day- to- day affairs. He was bound by his father’s agreement to cede operational control to the four minority stakeholders. “It was their decision to make,” he said.
“With declining attendance and declining performance, you have to give people a chance to try something. And so ultimately I just said,
‘Well, this is your call. Let’s try it. Let’s see what happens.’ But I never thought it was a good idea. That’s not hindsight twenty- twenty. That’s what I said at the time.”93
With the Pickett family contractually limited, the Islanders’ original logo had few other guardians. Most of the franchise’s former players had no knowledge of the proposal to abandon the logo they wore, and the few dynasty Islanders with executive roles in the organization, such as former coach Al Arbour, the vice president of hockey operations, and former defenseman Ken Morrow, the director of pro scouting, did not have a voice in the rebranding process. According to the meeting participants, the only alumnus with any say in the matter was Bob Nystrom, the director of amateur hockey development and alumni relations, who played nine hundred games wearing the Long Island map on his chest. “It’s the only logo that I played for,” said Nystrom, who spent his entire fourteen- year career on Long Island. “It was, I thought, well designed, and needless to say I was pretty fond of it.” Two participants in the rebranding process recalled the Islanders running the fisherman logo past Nystrom as a way of gauging alumni opinion.
Years later Nystrom said he “wasn’t really that keen on the new logo,”
which was “so totally dramatically different than the original logo that I just felt it wasn’t gonna fly.” However, Nystrom brushed aside questions about his obligation to fight for the original logo, insisting he “didn’t really have much say at the time.”94 It is true that Nystrom was not nearly as involved in the rebranding process as Walsh and Calabria, but it is hard to believe that arguably the most popular player in Islanders history was powerless to prevent the logo change. If Nystrom had voiced reservations, ownership might have reconsidered.
The NHL, for its part, has disavowed responsibility in the Islanders’
rebranding process. In addition to the fisherman logo, SME had pre-45
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sented the Islanders with logos based on a brick lighthouse built in 1857
on Fire Island, parallel to the south shore of Long Island. The 168- foot structure was painted with alternating black and white bands, making it a distinctive symbol of coastal living. Scalera said the NHL steered the Islanders away from the fisherman logo and toward a wordmark with the stylized lighthouse as the I in Islanders. Instead, the Islanders adopted the lighthouse as a shoulder patch and went with the fisherman as their primary symbol. “That wasn’t our first choice, and we told the team,” Scalera said. “But ultimately, it’s their decision.” In a 2013
documentary, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said with a smile, “I expressed skepticism that it would get traction.”95
Despite the NHL’s reticence the Islanders’ rebrand moved forward.
The team planned to let its humiliating last- place season conclude on May 2 and unveil the fisherman jerseys toward the end of the playoffs in June, just before the hockey media punched out for the summer. The timetable allowed several months for the Islanders to assess how fans would react to the new logo. However, the team ran only a few unscientific tests, cementing the impression that they had already decided on the fisherman. At one point Beach brought the fisherman jerseys t
o classes at Kings Park High School on Long Island, a forty- minute drive from Nassau Coliseum, and his alma mater, Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. Ironically, a university synonymous with public opinion polling was one of the only stops in a token research process that did not include a single poll of Islanders fans. There was Beach, hesitant to contradict his boss, running a proposed Islanders logo past students almost a hundred miles from the Islanders’ arena. “I said,
‘Hey, let’s go around the room here and vote,’” Beach remembered.
“Was it 100 percent one way or the other? No. There was probably about 50– 50.” Apparently, that was good enough.
On the ice the Islanders were trying to wrap up the 1994– 95 season with dignity. During one stretch in the middle of April they beat the Florida Panthers by two, lost to the Devils by three, dropped a one-goal game to the Rangers, and defeated the Quebec Nordiques 5– 2.
It wasn’t the most sensational hockey, but the string of competitive performances with Muller and Schneider on board preserved the 46
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Islanders’ pride.96 Fans were impressed by late- season call- ups such as goalie Tommy Salo, who starred for gold- medal winner Sweden at the 1994 Winter Olympics, and left wing Chris Marinucci, the 1994
Hobey Baker Award winner as the top college hockey player.97 Even Denis Potvin, the Islanders’ captain during the Stanley Cup dynasty, expressed hope for the floundering franchise. In an interview with Newsday, Potvin praised the team for bringing in the “consistency” of Muller and Schneider and the “real prize,” twenty- two- year- old center Craig Darby, a prospect acquired in the same trade.98 The season was down to its final week, and the Islanders were building much- needed momentum heading into the rebrand.