That’s okay. I know you’re still getting used to me.’ It’s not okay.”31 In his twenty- year career in professional hockey, Milbury belonged to only one losing team that missed the playoffs, and his early adversity with the Islanders and the famously critical New York media may have pushed him to a new level of ferocity that further damaged his relationship with the players.
Besides Milbury, the most obvious scapegoats for the Islanders’
misery were Don Maloney and the two established players he traded for, Kirk Muller and Wendel Clark. In interviews that may have been too forthright, Milbury and Maloney did not defend their two most talented players against widespread accusations they were tanking.
Muller and Clark had averaged almost a point per game in their careers, but through thirteen games in the 1995– 96 season, Muller had seven and Clark had six. Milbury said he had “no overt sense” they were going through the motions until they were traded, but he added, “I’m not that deep. Have they played very well? No. Read into that what you can.” Maloney was even more cryptic. “At some point,” he said, “the 114
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real story will come out.” Muller offered a similarly vague response when asked the straightforward question of whether his heart was into playing for the Islanders. “I don’t want to get into anything,” he said.
“The day will come. I’m just not allowed to say anything right now.”
For his part Clark came across as resentful that Milbury had not put him on the power play. “You can’t get points if you’re not on the power play,” he protested. The quotes contributed to the notion of a wayward organization. The reporters who nicknamed Nassau Coliseum “Fort Neverlose” during the dynasty years now called it a “temple of doom.”
The positivity in the fan base in the summer of 1995 quickly turned to animosity. In the Islander Insider newsletter, fans pushed for the trades of Muller and Clark and blamed Maloney for failing to acquire a playmaking center. A front- page story in the November issue began,
“Thus far the Islander management team has shown the foresight of George Armstrong Custer, the empathy of Marie Antoinette, the flexibility of Czar Nicholas II, & the inventiveness of Wil E. Coyote!”32
With the season slipping away, the Islanders had a final opportunity to turn around their fortunes, and save the fisherman rebrand, on November 10. Instead, the night sealed the fate of one of the worst branding failures in hockey history. The Islanders, mired in a three-game losing streak and dropping out of playoff contention, were scheduled for their second game against the Rangers, this time on enemy turf at Madison Square Garden. Uniting to defeat a common foe could be just the right salve to ease tensions between the increasingly agi-tated Milbury and the malcontents Muller and Clark. Alternately, a loss was sure to shatter any confidence left in the locker room and increase speculation about firings and trades. Salo and Söderström had been so inconsistent in goal that the Islanders handed the net over to Jamie McLennan, recently called up from the minors. “It’s a big rivalry and I’ve been able to experience it,” said McLennan, who had played parts of the past two seasons with the Islanders. “I know the intensity.
It’s going to be a good challenge.” In the Rangers’ net was former Islanders goalie Glenn Healy, unbeaten in five games that season.33
McLennan received scant support from his defense and allowed two 115
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goals each in the second and third en route to a 4– 1 loss.34 Yet again Muller was ineffective, registering just one shot on Healy. Clark was scoreless and minus two. Meanwhile, Milbury’s penchant for trash-talking haunted him for the second time in two meetings against the Islanders’ archrivals. After the game the Rangers again made clear that Milbury’s preseason statement about their arrogance had motivated them. “We played an arrogant game tonight,” Rangers coach Colin Campbell said. Asked for clarification, Campbell said, “You caught that, eh? Well, it was just an arrogant win. Little things catch up and statements catch up to people. We remember that.”35
The second straight loss to the Rangers set the tone for the remainder of the season both on and off the ice. For decades Islanders fans had tormented Rangers fans with singsong chants of “Nineteen- forty,”
referring to the last time the Rangers won a Stanley Cup. Then, in the course of sixteen tide- turning months, the Rangers’ championship in 1994 deprived Islanders fans of their favorite taunt, and the fisherman jerseys gave Rangers fans convenient fodder to verbally mock their rivals. “We just gave the Rangers a big gift to abuse the team,” Kasparaitis said. During the November 10 game, some Islanders players felt uncomfortable in their new- look uniforms. Among them was Brent Severyn, an enforcer whose duty was to jaw and jab at opposing players.
“You’re playing the Rangers, you know what I mean? The Rangers. And you’ve got a fisherman on your jersey.”36
Rangers fans had historically returned the “Nineteen- forty” chants with cries of “Potvin sucks,” directed at former Islanders star defenseman Denis Potvin. As McLennan stiffed the Rangers in the first period the home crowd stuck with Potvin taunts. Once the Rangers went ahead in the second, their fans began mocking the Islanders logo with a new, full- throated chant of “We want fish sticks!” Two Rangers fans drew laughter by marching through the arena wearing yellow rain slickers and fake gray beards. As Newsday pointed out, “The frozen-dinner fisherman on the visitors’ sweaters might not have seemed so funny if the game had been hotly contested.” Instead, the Rangers dominated, and there was little for Islanders fans to do but slump in their seats and bear the barbs. “The ‘fish sticks’ and all that, I felt bad 116
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for the fans,” Vukota remembered. “It’s more of an embarrassment for an Islander fan than it was for the players.”37
Eventually, the “We want fish sticks!” chant followed the Islanders to Nassau Coliseum, uttered by the very fans who were supposed to spark the team. The fans associated the fisherman with a struggling, volatile coach and dissatisfied, underachieving players, while the original logo evoked the glory days the fan base longed to return to.
“Maybe that’s the reason why they jumped on the bandwagon too with that chant,” said Islanders radio broadcaster Chris King, “just to try to move the process along to get back to the logo that they all loved.”
Fans conveyed their disgust by tossing fish sticks and raw fish onto the ice. “It was a pain in the neck to get it off,” recalled Lance Elder, then the Coliseum’s assistant general manager. According to Elder, a piece of fish was once scooped off the ice with a shovel, tossed under the bleachers, and forgotten until it began to smell a few days later.38
Islanders players generally said they did not pay much attention to the backlash against the logo because they had no say over what they wore. “As a player, you’re just a soldier,” said Mathieu Schneider, then a seven- year veteran. “You put on your game face and try to make the best of a situation.” Travis Green, in his fourth season with the Islanders, agreed. “You don’t overthink things that aren’t in your control.” For the bubble players on the roster, wearing any NHL
jersey, no matter fans’ opinions about it, symbolized the attainment of a lifelong goal to compete at hockey’s highest level. After years of paying dues in college and the minor leagues, they said they were not fazed by vitriol from the stands. “You’re playing for the Islanders,”
said Dan Plante, who played his first full NHL season in the fisherman jerseys. “It doesn’t matter what symbol is on the front of your jersey.”
Others said they were too focused on wrapping up their professional careers to be concerned with the failed rebranding of the team. “I certainly didn’t understand the need for it, but I wasn’t asking that question either,” said twenty- eight- year- old Chris Luongo, playing his last season in the NHL. “That wasn’t in my area.” Danton Cole, another twenty- eight- year- old playing his last NHL season, said he did not let reaction
s to the uniform distract him from trying to earn 117
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more playing time. “If that gets you off your game, then boy, you got bigger problems than a jersey.”39
Nevertheless, the fans’ reactions confirmed the players’ skepticism toward the jerseys. Week after week of hearing fans unleash derisive chants and throw fish onto the ice must have tested the motivation of men already coping with the annoyance of losing and playing under a hard- driving coach. “You felt the fans’ frustration with it and you read articles and so forth,” Plante said. “That was somewhat frustrating as a player, that they’re more worried about that than maybe the play on the ice.” While marketing was beyond the players’ domain, they had heard the common mantra in sports to play for the logo on the front of the jersey, not the name on the back. The adage reminds players to place team over self, but the debacle surrounding the fisherman jerseys damaged their faith in the organization’s judgment. “The pride that you need to have in the jersey and the logo is important,” said Dean Chynoweth, “so obviously when they made such a drastic switch, it was with mixed emotions.” The chants challenged players including Rich Pilon to draw pride from wearing the fisherman. “When teams used to yell ‘Fish sticks!’ at us, it was kind of, Oh my God. How could you take the Islander logo and change it to that?” Defenseman Jason Holland remembered fans asking for his thoughts on the logo as he walked between Nassau Coliseum and the nearby Long Island Marriott. “It was awkward,” he said. “I did have my own opinion and I didn’t like it either, but it wasn’t something that you were going to openly share during that period of time because that’s what you were wearing on your chest.” The insults at Madison Square Garden gave pause to assistant coach Guy Charron. “Where it became more obvious is when we’d go to New York and they’d scream during the game, ‘Fish stick!’ That’s when you come to terms: Was the logo thought out as well as it should have been?” Similarly, goaltending coach Bob Froese questioned the organizational decision to change uniforms instead of players. “I would sooner change the numbers and the names on the back of the jersey than I would change the crest or the logo and the identity of the team.”40
Like the fans, the players drafted into the organization were upset that the fisherman had pushed out the original Islanders sweater. The 118
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Long Island map crest was the first and only NHL logo that many of them had worn. “It meant a lot to me because when I came in I didn’t know a lot about [the] Islanders,” said Darius Kasparaitis, who slipped on the original jersey the day he was drafted fifth overall in 1992. “That’s what I knew. I didn’t know anything else. There were no third jerseys in those days, so that’s all we had.” Other players grew up as hockey fans in the early 1980s, when the map logo was associated with the success of the dynasty teams, and they entered the Islanders organization hoping to wear the symbol they recalled from their youth.
As a teenager in Sweden, Niklas Andersson watched fellow Swedes Tomas Jonsson, Anders Kallur, and Stefan Persson contribute to the Stanley Cup runs. “I learned to like that [logo] pretty early when I was younger,” Andersson remembered. “With their success earlier and some Swedes playing there, it was very familiar to me before I got there.” Disappointed by the fisherman jerseys, the players privately shared laughs in the dressing room. “Honestly, we all had a bit of a chuckle at it,” Chynoweth recalled. “It was kind of like, Oh really?
That’s what we’re gonna wear? It wasn’t inspirational by any means.”41
If even the players being paid to wear the jerseys did not like them, the Islanders had little hope of convincing fans to buy their own.
Within the franchise the logo quickly became a scapegoat for the Islanders’ poor play. Only two months into the season the team already had two four- game losing streaks, and the players’ dislike for the jerseys had them searching for other motivations to get through a long season. Rich Pilon said that he stayed driven by focusing on the men sitting beside him on the bench. “You put the jersey on for the team, so to look past that when you’re wearing that jersey that I didn’t care for on my side— lots of players didn’t either— then you’re playing for your teammates, right?”42
Islanders executives said they did not remember any player complaining directly to management, but the simmering dissatisfaction over the uniforms reached them anyway. Pat Calabria did not understand the objections. “What is it about it as a player don’t you like about it? It’s not Goldilocks on the front. It’s not something effeminate. It’s very similar to a pirate, wouldn’t you say? So what is so offensive about 119
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it?” At one point Calabria was approached by a trainer who claimed to have run an unusual experiment involving the jersey. The trainer said he placed the old and new uniforms in pails of water and weighed them.
He found the fisherman jerseys were heavier and concluded that they were slowing down the players on the ice. Calabria was incredulous.
“That’s hardly scientific, okay? Hardly scientific,” he said, still annoyed years later. “How much more could the patch of a new jersey weigh over the old jersey? A hundredth of an ounce? A fiftieth of an ounce?
That’s the reason the team was on an eight- game losing streak? The patch? Really?”43
As the personification of the logo, Nyisles continued to have trouble connecting with fans. The abuse began to wear on the man inside the costume, Rob Di Fiore, who had spent years battling personal demons that the Islanders knew nothing about. Before his stint as Nyisles, Di Fiore worked at Barneys, the luxury fashion store in Manhattan, and he became so concerned that he did not fit in there that he resorted to drinking and drugs. At twenty- one he overdosed and almost died.44 Di Fiore said he had been sober for eight years by the time he began the Islanders’ mascoting gig, and he was comfortable enough in his identity as a recovering addict that he broke his anonymity as an alcoholic to Islanders defenseman Darius Kasparaitis, who had admitted to his own struggles with drinking.45 However, Di Fiore was still suffering from depression, and the reactions that Nyisles received in the Nassau Coliseum stands did little to lift his spirits.
Some fans who abused the mascot were repeat offenders. Game after game the same boy approached Nyisles, punched him in the ribs or kicked him in the groin, and ran away before Di Fiore could catch him. On one occasion Di Fiore finally saw where the boy was sitting. He went to his dressing room, changed out of the costume and into street clothes, and headed back to the arena bowl in a nasty mood. “I went right to where that kid was sitting,” Di Fiore recalled.
“Obviously, you can’t do anything to a fan, but I just whispered in his ear, ‘I know who you are.’ I think I scared him. He never bothered me again.” Another time Nyisles was working a street hockey fair in the Nassau Coliseum parking lot when a teenage boy took a stick and 120
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whacked the mascot between the legs, sending Di Fiore crumpling to the blacktop. “I just went down, and I just thought, Forget it. I just got hit big time. That hurt.” From then on Di Fiore wore a cup every time he put on the costume.46
On the ice the Islanders continued to tumble through November.
After the Rangers game that spawned the “We want fish sticks!” chant, the Islanders fell to St. Louis the next night to run their losing streak to five games. Interest in the team brand waned. After attracting 15,222
and 16,297 fans for their first two home games, the Islanders averaged just 9,902 over the next six.47 Meanwhile, Kirk Muller, supposedly the best player on the roster, had a team- worst minus- ten rating. In the latest sign of the turmoil in the organization, Don Maloney told the sulking Muller not to accompany the team on a three- game road trip to California. “We have decided to ask Kirk to go home,” he said. “He will not play for the New York Islanders again.”48 Muller’s overdue exit eliminated a distraction in the dressing room but did little to spark the team, which dropped two of the three
games on the trip, including one by an embarrassing 9– 2 margin in Los Angeles. The Islanders ended November at 5- 15- 3.
The Islanders’ disavowal of Muller highlighted the disconnect between players and management. Maloney and Milbury criticized Muller for betraying the organization. “Any player that doesn’t want to play for us, we’ll get them out of here as soon as possible,” Maloney told reporters. “We want everybody to be united behind the Islanders crest.” Striking a similar tone, Milbury said, “You’ve got to have twenty guys in the room and on the ice that care about each other and want to be on the Islanders hockey club.”49 The players, who were already skeptical about the front office’s decision to rebrand, sympathized with their castaway teammate. From their perspective Muller was understandably jarred by the trade from the Canadiens, a franchise he led to a Stanley Cup, and longed to play for a contender again. Decades later Islanders players spoke about Muller almost unanimously in glowing terms. Brent Severyn called him “very gifted” and “a guy that would battle and not take any guff from anybody.” Asked if Muller’s refusal to report affected the team, Mick Vukota blamed the Islanders for foster-121
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ing a bush- league atmosphere that made the veteran Muller want out of Long Island. “I’ll tell you,” Vukota said, “it’s a direct reflection of
[how] the organization was perceived at that time.” Darius Kasparaitis said he too understood why Muller requested a trade. “I think it was hard for him to come to a team that was rebuilding. Nobody wanted to play for the Islanders in those years between having a funny jersey and having a rebuild.”50 Muller declined a request to be interviewed for this book.
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