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Boston Garden. Milbury named disgruntled center Kirk Muller an alternate captain, but Muller said he might sit out the opener if he could not come to terms on a new contract by game time. Scott Lachance, arguably the Islanders’ best defenseman, made a surprise return from a groin injury that cost him almost all of training camp. Wendel Clark was scheduled to make his Islanders debut, and can’t- miss prospects Todd Bertuzzi and Bryan McCabe would lace up for their first- ever NHL
game.65 The Bruins, led by future Hall of Famers Cam Neely and Ray Bourque, threatened to steamroll the inexperienced Islanders, but Milbury assured the press that his current team was prepared for his former one. “They’ll have all they can handle with us,” he said. “I promise you.
The guys are ready to play.”66 With so many compelling side stories, the rollout of the fisherman jerseys was barely mentioned by the press.
The players who cracked the season- opening lineup reflected the mixture of youth and experience the Islanders wanted to usher in the fisherman era. Pat Flatley, the longest- tenured Islander, remained the captain for the fifth straight season, while Milbury designated two of the newest Islanders— Muller and offensive defenseman Mathieu Schneider— as alternates. For the top line Milbury went with veterans: the twenty- nine- year- old Muller would center the twenty- eight- year-old Clark and twenty- five- year- old Marty McInnis. On the second he went with three promising young forwards: the twenty- year- old Bertuzzi and twenty- three- year- old Žiggy Pálffy would flank twenty- four-year- old Travis Green. Tellingly, Brett Lindros, who was presented as the franchise’s face of the future for months, dispatched to autograph signings and appearing in newspaper ads, was reduced to third- line status. Tommy Söderström, entering his fourth NHL campaign, started in goal. The Islanders would begin the season with three players who were legitimate candidates for rookie of the year: Bertuzzi, McCabe, and back- up goaltender Tommy Salo.67
In the broadcast booth, new Islanders play- by- play announcer Howie Rose joined color commentator Ed Westfall, an original Islanders player who was the franchise’s first captain. After the Bruins took the ice the SportsChannel camera caught Islanders players approaching the bench.
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“Here they come, the new- look Islanders,” Westfall announced.
Out skated Muller, then Flatley, McInnis, and Pálffy, until all the Islanders were present.
Except for one.
“Mike Milbury, of course, will be behind the bench for the first time as a New York Islander,” Rose said. “And, um, he doesn’t seem all that anxious to get out there, you know. His players are on the ice. The Bruins coaching staff is assembled behind their bench.”
Rose paused.
“Where’s Mike Milbury? He’s gonna answer the bell. Won’t he?”
The Islanders’ assistant coach Guy Charron appeared in the dimly lit runway leading from the locker room to the bench. But Milbury, the face of the rebrand, remained absent.
“I’m sure Mike will come out once the national anthem and so on has been played,” Westfall said. “He probably feels a little more comfortable not coming out onto the bench at this time.”
The sellout crowd let out a cheer at the sight of singer Rene Rancourt, who had been intoning the national anthem at Bruins games for twenty years. The Islanders stood on the bench, swaying from side to side, still without their coach.
As Rancourt reached “land of the free,” Milbury finally emerged on the runway, glanced at the scoreboard, and briskly walked to the bench, much to the announcers’ amusement.
“Don’t think Mike Milbury wasn’t trying to low- key this,” Rose said.
“While everybody was on their feet for the anthem, that’s when Milbury sort of snuck in from the runway leading to the Islander dressing room and winds up behind the Islander bench.”
Rose laughed while the television broadcast replayed Milbury’s unconventional entrance. Westfall narrated, “All of a sudden, attention is somewhere else, he appears behind the bench.” Most viewers probably dismissed Milbury’s stealthy appearance as last- minute nerves before his debut as Islanders coach or an attempt to avoid the television cameras from catching his first walk to the bench against his old team.68
Something else was amiss, though. Both goaltenders were in their creases, and the starting forwards and defensemen were skating at 99
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center ice as if the opening puck drop was imminent, yet nothing happened. The cameras zoomed in on Tommy Söderström, wearing his signature oversize cage, and the Bruins broadcast blamed the puzzling situation on a problem with his equipment. Little did they know that Milbury, after waiting till the national anthem to emerge on the bench, was now slowing down the game itself. According to Charron, Milbury had inexplicably loosened a knot that tied shut the door where the players entered onto the ice.
“Mike had different ways,” Charron said. “He knew that there was gonna be a lot of emotion. He wanted to delay the game. He found a way to undo the knot of the door so that he would bring attention to the referee that the door wasn’t closing properly and it would delay the game and somehow psychologically would change the outcome of the game. Mike had always different things, different ways.”69
The season hadn’t officially started yet, and the Islanders were already sensing why their coach was nicknamed Mad Mike.
When the game began the Islanders’ play reflected Milbury’s approach. Early in the first period the Bruins scrambled for a loose puck in the slot, while Söderström sat in the crease. Conventional strategy would have the Islanders looking to clear the puck away from their fallen goaltender, but the three Islanders in front of the net, Travis Green, Bryan McCabe, and Brent Severyn, all played the bodies of their opponents, not the puck. Bruins color commentator Derek Sanderson was incredulous. “Get a look at Mike Milbury’s philosophy of ‘take your man in front of the net.’ If you start focusing on just ‘take the body,’ you can be in trouble. Mike Milbury likes to do that in his career, but there’s a time and a place to play the puck.”
A minute later the Islanders’ Bob Sweeney was called for holding.
After Sweeney skated to the penalty box Milbury caught the announcers off guard again. “This has the appearance of a time- out by the Islanders,” said Bruins play- by- play commentator Fred Cusick, right before the public address announcer confirmed Milbury’s unusual decision. “And that’s hard to believe and a rarity in this game, but it is called by Mike Milbury.”70
The strange strategy didn’t help. Boston scored twice in a twenty-100
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six- second span, igniting the crowd of 17,565. The Islanders responded with a Travis Green goal on their first power play of the season before the period was through. Then the teams traded goals. Forty- two seconds into the third period, Cam Neely netted his third of the game to put the Bruins up four to two. The Islanders skated away dejectedly.
Black and yellow caps descended onto the ice to celebrate the first hat trick in FleetCenter history. New season, new coach, new jersey, same old Islanders.
But the team didn’t quit. First, Kirk Muller, whose appearance in the game signaled a possible thaw in contract negotiations, knocked in a rebound to bring the Islanders within one. Then Green banged home his second goal off a slapper from Pálffy. A scoreless overtime gave New York its first point of the season, a feel- good tie on the road against their coach’s former employer. By most accounts the season opener was a success. Milbury’s charged- up team had rallied from two goals down on three occasions and overcome the emotion of the opening of a new arena for an Original Six franchise. Lachance returned unexpectedly early from injury. Bertuzzi scored his first NHL goal. The New York Times described the line of Pálffy, Green, and Bertuzzi as dominant. The usually critical Daily News ran the headline “Milbury Savors Boston Tie Party.” Newsday proclaimed, “Handsome Tie.”71
/> During an interview on the Bruins broadcast, Milbury said the Islanders’ trade for Clark confirmed their commitment to winning. “As long as we’re working hard, and we have been, some good things are gonna happen,” he said.72
Maybe there was hope for the fisherman jerseys yet.
Heartened by the tie against the Bruins, the Islanders headed to Toronto to face the Maple Leafs in their second game of the season.
For the second straight game the Islanders would oppose an Original Six franchise in its home opener. After the first game saw Milbury face the team that he coached in a Stanley Cup Final, the second pitted Wendel Clark against the club he captained for three seasons. It was Clark’s first game against the Maple Leafs since he was traded away fifteen months prior. Emotions were heightened further because the 101
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more tenured Islanders would skate versus their former teammate Benoit Hogue, a three- time thirty- goal scorer on Long Island, for the first time since his trade in April. The cause of the trade was perplexing: general manager Don Maloney made the deal after reading an article in which Hogue expressed disappointment that he was not included in an earlier trade, but Hogue insisted his words were misinterpreted.73
As with game one of the season, the many subplots surrounding game two diverted attention from the new jerseys.
While in Toronto the players figured they would spend game day eating together in the team hotel, stealing afternoon naps, and heading to the rink. To their surprise Milbury, ever unpredictable, canceled the team meal, a fixture for traveling NHL teams. His players were handed per diems and sent onto the streets of a foreign city to find their own food.
“Instead of going to the hotel that we were staying at in Toronto, we were forced to go out to try and find a place that would serve twenty guys chicken and pasta at 11:30, 12 in the morning,” Mick Vukota remembered. “We did it, but it threw off everybody’s routine and schedule. And that’s in Toronto, so the media is writing about it in the Toronto Sun the next day, how the Islanders don’t do a team meal anymore before the game. You talk about division? Guys just want to eat and get to bed. We’re all breaking up into groups of five ’cause you can get served quicker than if you walk in as a group of twenty- five.”74
Team spirit, which had been buoyed by the come- from- behind tie against Boston, suffered another blow when Milbury scratched Derek King, depriving perhaps the best- liked man in the dressing room of playing in his hometown. The Maple Leafs came out to a raucous crowd revved up by a laser light show and fireworks. The Islanders, meanwhile, looked like a mess. They took stupid penalties and were outshot fifty to twenty- one. Söderström allowed six goals in two periods, raising his goals- against average to 5.71. Salo let in another. Brett Lindros recklessly hit a Leafs defenseman from behind and was punished with a five- minute major penalty and an automatic game misconduct. The game ended with a lopsided score of seven to three.75
After Lindros’s dangerous check, the Leafs responded with explosive 102
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hits and gritty goals. “We stuck together as a team,” Leafs coach Pat Burns said. Meanwhile, Milbury’s Islanders were falling apart. Newsday’s back page nicknamed the beleaguered starting goaltender “Sieve Söderström,” and beat reporters speculated that the team might have to call up Éric Fichaud. Clark mustered only two shots in his much-hyped homecoming. Sparkplug defenseman Darius Kasparaitis, a restricted free agent, was threatening to play in Europe unless general manager Don Maloney offered him a $1 million contract.76 Behind the scenes Maloney was also frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations with Kirk Muller. “I’m getting a little tired of it,” Maloney said. Added Muller, “Right now, I’m not happy the way the talks have gone.”77 As the Islanders flew home for the opener at Nassau Coliseum they looked every bit of the disaster that preseason reports made them out to be.
At the time the front office was coming up against a key deadline that would dictate the length of the rebranding campaign. The Islanders were committed to the fisherman jerseys for the remainder of the 1995– 96 season, but they could still opt to abandon the logo in time for the start of their silver anniversary season in October 1996. They just had to make the decision fast. The NHL did not want licensees and retailers stuck with racks of jerseys that were about to be obsolete.
As a safeguard teams were mandated to notify the league of a logo change for the 1996– 97 season by October 15 to give stores at least one calendar year to deplete their stock of outgoing uniforms. That date fell on the day after the Islanders’ home opener.78
Only a few games into the season the reaction to the fisherman logo was mixed. Since the jerseys hit stores on August 1, anecdotal feedback was largely positive.79 The owner of a major sporting- goods chain said that he expected strong sales.80 The manager of a store in the Roosevelt Field Mall, the largest shopping center on Long Island, said that a shipment of 120 T- shirts and hats with the new logo was almost completely depleted in a week’s time.81 The manager of another store in Westbury said that the new jersey was selling “like hotcakes.”82
Still, many Long Islanders were vocally opposed to the logo. The day after the new jersey was unveiled in June, Newsday invited fans to mail in their reactions with a form that contained the sort of lead-103
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ing questions that encouraged second- guessing.83 Not surprisingly, more than one thousand responses flooded into the newspaper, the vast majority of them negative. Asked if the team even needed a new logo, a whopping 74 percent of respondents said no. When queried more specifically about the fisherman logo, 78 percent said they did not like it. One person suggested the logo be shipped to Nashville, which was rumored to be the next landing spot for an NHL expansion team. Another proposed placing it on a can of clam chowder. Some wondered about the connection between fishing and hockey. Others said the fisherman looked too mean, too old, like Santa Claus, and, of course, like the Gorton’s fisherman. For comparison, Newsday ran a photograph of a box of Gorton’s crunchy, breaded fish sticks, with the fisherman at the top.84
Other objections to the logo came alive in a series of quotes and letters to the editor that the newspaper published over the summer.
Chris Goltermann of Seaford called the change a “disgrace.” Douglas Guarino of Islip Terrace claimed the Islanders had “lost their last bit of dignity.”85 Jeanne Schumacher of Bethpage suggested that Gorton’s sue the Islanders for copyright infringement.86 And John Mateer of Wantagh called for a boycott of any fisherman merchandise.87
The feedback in Newsday was far more extensive than what the Islanders had bothered to seek. However, the team maintained its public defense of the logo. Pat Calabria, the Islanders’ vice president of communications, told Newsday that the skeptical feedback “flies directly in the face of the reaction it got here and the reaction it got out in the street.” The respondents in Newsday constituted a small sample size, and the critical messages were written before the Islanders wore the jersey in a single game. Ownership did not know how the reception might play out in the coming months. “At the beginning of the season, there was a vocal minority of diehard fans against the logo,”
said Islanders cochairman Robert Rosenthal. “We thought, If this continues, we will readdress it.”88
The deadline to submit a logo change passed without any action.
No matter what happened in its first season, the fisherman would live to see a second.
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5
Dead in the Water
On the verge of their first home opener in the fisherman jerseys, the Islanders were still looking for their first victory. At a time when the franchise needed consistent faces to represent the new brand, Tommy Söderström, who started the season as the number- one goalie, was usurped by Tommy Salo only two games into the season. Brett Lindros, hyped in preseason newspaper ads, was awaiting a possible suspension for his dubious check in the Maple Leafs game. Fan- favorite d
efenseman Darius Kasparaitis became so disgruntled over contract negotiations that he walked out. The Islanders suspected that top center Kirk Muller, who was insisting on a four- year deal that would pay him as much as superior scorers like Theo Fleury and Cam Neely, had little interest in playing on Long Island and was trying to trigger a trade to a contender. Coach Mike Milbury named Muller an alternate captain just days earlier. Now Milbury wondered if Muller would even be in the dressing room much longer, let alone a leader. “If a contract problem is going to be a distraction,” Milbury said, “I’d just as soon he go away.”1
A few days before the home opener the pun- happy Daily News ran a headline saying the Islanders were “lost at sea.”2 If so, their arena was not the shining beacon that they needed. By 1995 Nassau Coliseum was an albatross. Located in the middle of a parking lot, with a bland, concrete facade and a height of only seventy- five feet above ground level, the Coliseum never had an imposing appearance. Still, its seats were filled in the early 1980s because the Islanders won nineteen consecutive playoff series and four Stanley Cups. When filled to capacity the sixteen- thousand- seat Coliseum was the epitome of the old barns erected in the 1970s, with “Let’s go, Islanders!” chants bouncing off 105
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the low ninety- seven- foot ceilings.3 “It was great,” said Bruce Bennett, the Islanders’ team photographer from 1982 to 2004. “Any of those old NHL arenas, which were more intimate and smaller and less the big, cavernous arenas that many of the teams play in now, the fans are closer to the players.” As late as 1993, when the Islanders made an unlikely run to the conference final, the volume of the crowd made up for the unattractive sight of garbage bags and trash cans strewn about the Islanders’ locker room to catch dripping water, the result of a lack of maintenance by the local government. “You went in there and you knew that the home team had an advantage with the fans,”
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