the Pickett regime, the Islanders began running a series of offbeat newspaper ads that acknowledged the organization’s shortcomings.
A large spot in the New York Times announced Gluckstern’s acquisition of not only the Islanders but also “millions of long- suffering fans who have endured a serious depression and are owed a vigorous recovery.”
Another ad in Newsday honored the dictionary definition of an Islanders fan— someone who “never, ever gives up hope in the club,” despite management turnover, long lines for the Nassau Coliseum bathrooms, rude comments from Rangers fans, and “silly logo changes.” The ad closed with the original logo and a pledge from Gluckstern and Milstein to reward the loyalty of the fan base.57
Gluckstern also preyed on fans’ hunger for another championship.
One ad in Newsday pictured the four Stanley Cup banners in the Nassau Coliseum rafters next to a blank spot where a fifth banner could be raised. The space read, “Coming Soon.” The same image was plastered on a billboard on Hempstead Turnpike, where the Islanders’ dynasty teams paraded in the early 1980s. Gluckstern thought that promising a fifth title would associate the Islanders with winning again. “Remember this was a losing franchise,” he said. “In many ways, people think of it as a cursed franchise. One can argue it’s still cursed.”58 The front office viewed the tactics with more skepticism. Despite the optimism brought by the sale of the team, the 1997– 98 Islanders were hardly championship caliber. The team wouldn’t even qualify for the playoffs or finish with a winning record that season. There was no reason to believe a team that had just traded away its promising young captain, Bryan McCabe, would contend in the near future, either.59 At best the pledge that a fifth Stanley Cup was “coming soon” was premature; at worst, it was baseless. Beach was aghast when ownership pitched the idea of raising a “Coming Soon” banner to the rafters. His resistance precipitated a falling- out with Gluckstern and his departure from the team. “They were asking me to do stuff that you just, as a fan, would never want to be part of,” Beach remembered. “Raising a Stanley Cup banner that says, ‘Coming Soon’? I said, ‘We would become the mockery of the league.’ And they never did it, so if that was worth getting fired over, it was.”60 Beach left to work for the Mighty Ducks, 178
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the team whose strong uniform sales had encouraged the Islanders to switch jerseys a few seasons earlier.
The new ownership closed the fisherman era with two symbolic gestures in one week in March 1998. The first came on Tuesday, March 3, which was designated True Islander Fan Night. The promotion was designed to repair the strained relationship between the team and its alumni brought on by changing the classic logo. Before the Islanders played the Philadelphia Flyers, the franchise they defeated to win their first Stanley Cup in 1980, a pregame ceremony honored the players from the championship teams. With Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” blaring over the public address system, nineteen former players took the ice, including Mike Bossy, the franchise leader in goals, and Bob Nystrom, who scored in overtime to clinch the title. A surprise appearance was made by Bryan Trottier, the team’s all- time leading scorer, who had filed for bankruptcy and reportedly refused to appear at previous Islanders events unless he was compensated.61 (Gluckstern and Milstein apparently got Trottier to come by paying him to autograph pucks that were mailed to season- ticket holders as gifts.)62
The Islanders also made an effort to merge the past with the future.
In an emotional moment, former Islanders captain Denis Potvin, the personification of the Stanley Cup teams, handed over the captain’s jersey to Trevor Linden, recently acquired in a trade with Vancouver.63
Whereas the fisherman jerseys had been unveiled to grant the team a new identity, True Islander Fan Night was about tying the team to its heritage. “This doesn’t mean you live in the past,” Bossy said. “It means you embrace what the team did back in those days.”64
As part of the festivities the team gave an unusual assignment to fourth- line enforcer Steve Webb, who made his NHL debut that season. Seeking a flashy end to the fisherman era, the team told Webb to skate to center ice in his fisherman jersey and dramatically rip it off to reveal a jersey with the original logo. “Actually, I was a little nervous not really knowing what I was supposed to do,” Webb recalled. “Skate to center ice, rip it off, and then what? I didn’t really have a script or anything so I didn’t really know what to expect.” He followed orders, and the arena erupted with cheering and applause.65
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Opinions on the display varied. Some, including Tom Croke of the Support the Islanders Coalition, thought it was an effective way of admitting the fisherman jerseys were a mistake and moving on. “I had friends of mine who wanted to see the thing burned,” Croke said. “They wanted to see all the Islanders take off their fisherman jerseys, throw it in one of those fifty- five- gallon drums, and burn it.” Others viewed the destruction of the jersey as an unnecessary gimmick that only called more attention to the disastrous rebrand and disparaged the well- intentioned people behind it. Learning of the spectacle decades later, designer Pat McDarby, who worked on the new logo for SME, expressed surprise and anger. “Don’t make a media circus out of it,” he said. “You’re taking everybody who was involved in that thing and embarrassing them.”66
On Saturday, March 7, the Gluckstern group took another swipe at the fisherman jerseys. The Islanders offered an unusual invitation for fans to bring any merchandise with the fisherman logo to Nassau Coliseum and trade it in for a T- shirt with the original crest. “Our mission,”
said a top Islanders executive, “is to restore dignity to Islanders fans and to fishermen everywhere by ending this doomed association.”67
Fans arrived to the game versus the Colorado Avalanche with 1,295
jerseys, shirts, and caps to exchange. Every item was donated to the American Red Cross of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the site of the corporate headquarters of Gorton’s frozen fish.68 Gluckstern, ever the showman, dressed up for the occasion to greet fans on the arena concourse. The eccentric Islanders owner, who already had a salt- and-pepper beard that evoked the fisherman’s, wore a large yellow overcoat to complete the look. “There was a lot of laughter and cheering and fun,” Gluckstern remembered. “People were engaged again, saying,
‘Okay, here’s an owner that’s willing to go and have fun and make fun and be part of trying to get some excitement.’” Brett Pickett thought the outfit was effective. “It was a fun way to call attention to it, so I was delighted that that happened.” Others frowned upon the costume.
Islanders broadcaster Howie Rose thought Gluckstern wanted to be perceived as caring about the fans without spending any money on players. “I just thought that it was a gratuitous show of interest in the 180
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team at least on the surface when not very below the surface it was a rather obvious ploy for a little attention.”69
Even as the Islanders disavowed the fisherman logo, the team retained the man most associated with the rebrand. In fact, Mike Milbury’s powers within the franchise were increasing under the new ownership, to the dismay of the fan base. On March 11, with the Islanders coming off an encouraging 6- 4- 2 streak, Milbury fired Rick Bowness as coach and reinserted himself behind the bench, saying he thought the team needed a “boost.”70 Outsiders were skeptical that Milbury, after clashing with his players during his first stint as coach, would somehow inspire them in his second. The 7th Man railed, “Why now, Mike? Even fans who wanted Bowness out are disgusted that Milbury has jumped back in.”71 He coached nineteen games to close out another losing season, then returned to coach forty- five more in 1998– 99 before hiring a replacement.72 In parts of four seasons coaching on Long Island, Milbury finished with twice as many losses as wins and no playoff berths.
Interestingly, many of the players whom Milbury coached with the Islanders went on to coach professionally
themselves. When those players- turned- coaches were asked whether they incorporated elements of Milbury’s coaching style into their own, some of them laughed at the thought. Dean Chynoweth, who became an assistant coach with the Islanders for three seasons from 2009 to 2012, said that Milbury’s misguided attempts to inspire the team led him to “do things which in today’s game would never happen.” When Milbury informed Chynoweth that he had been traded in 1995, the coach took the unusual step of asking a player for advice on how to run the team that just discarded him. Chynoweth told Milbury that he was mis-reading some of the players. “I said, ‘You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure it out,’” Chynoweth recalled.73 Milbury never did.
Still, former Islanders players largely spoke diplomatically about Milbury. They said they respected Milbury’s will to win, if not his meth-ods. Chris Taylor, an assistant coach for the highest minor league affiliate of the Buffalo Sabres, said that playing under Milbury taught him to treat players as he wanted to be treated— apparently better 181
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than Milbury treated the Islanders.74 Chris Luongo, an assistant coach with a program that develops amateur players in the United States for international competition, said that he places expectations on players and puts demands on them, as Milbury did.75 Even Travis Green, who was traded and characterized as a “gutless puke” by Milbury, stayed positive.76 “Mike had a lot of passion, a lot of fire in him,” Green said in 2015, when he was coaching the highest minor league affiliate of the Vancouver Canucks, on his way to a promotion to the Canucks’
head- coaching job. “If you have passion and you have fire, you know that at least a person’s trying to do the right things.”77
Like Milbury, Nyisles also lingered at Nassau Coliseum after the fisherman logo was abandoned. The new ownership, which had so flamboyantly moved away from the fisherman jerseys, spared the mascot to avoid a total remake of the franchise in a short time period.
“I don’t think we were wild about it, but you also don’t want to change everything overnight,” Gluckstern said. “It’s sort of identified there. It was part of a transition.” Time has clouded exactly when the Islanders dispensed with Nyisles, but primary sources establish that he made his last appearance sometime between the spring of 1998 and the fall of 2001, when the Islanders introduced his replacement, Sparky the Dragon.78 There is no record of the Islanders ever producing merchandise featuring Nyisles, and only a handful of photos of the mascot have surfaced online. Rob Di Fiore, who played Nyisles, cracked the oversize head on a turnstile and left it behind in small- claims court when he sued the Islanders. He did keep the other elements of the outfit, though: a jersey, shorts, and suspenders from the original costume, worn during the shortened 1994– 95 season; the jersey with the fisherman logo, worn in 1995– 96 and 1996– 97; two hockey bags; a pair of skates; and the fanny pack that held the battery to charge the light atop the mascot’s head.79
While the new ownership group disavowed the fisherman logo, they never spent the money necessary to rehabilitate the Islanders from the disastrous rebrand. As dynasty goaltender Billy Smith said on True Islander Fan Night, “It’s not the shirt that’s going to win you the Stanley Cup. It’s what you put under the jersey.”80 Gluckstern 182
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and Milstein were not inclined to open their wallets for high- caliber players, though. They predicated any improvements to the roster on obtaining development rights from Nassau County to erect a new arena and build a hotel, stores, and restaurants on the surrounding property.81 With the negotiations between the team and the county stalling, ownership neglected the Islanders.82 “They kept the team for a while, but they didn’t spend a nickel on it. I mean, not a nickel,” said Islanders broadcaster Howie Rose. At one point Rose and broadcast colleague Joe Micheletti gently tried to persuade David Seldin, the team president under Gluckstern and Milstein, that ownership might make a profit on the franchise if they put some money into it. Seldin balked.83 He complained that the Islanders were losing $11 million a year already and said that no more money would be spent until a new arena was built.84 Rose figured the owners had underestimated the dif-ficulty of securing the development rights, effectively leading them to purchase the team only to watch it rot when the pipe dream of a smooth redevelopment did not materialize. “They were just misinformed or misguided or both and, like a lot of people in that situation, guilty of some hubris. And boy, they paid the price. But more to the point, and more importantly, and more unfortunately, so did Islander fans.”85
Unwilling to spend on elite players, the Islanders had little chance to compete in the postlockout NHL. In three seasons under Gluckstern and Milstein from 1997– 98 to 1999– 2000, the Islanders went 78- 138-30, with two last- place finishes and zero playoff berths. The rebranding of the Islanders might have been remembered as an unfortunate but brief chapter in the franchise’s history if Gluckstern and Milstein led a renaissance in its immediate aftermath. Instead, the fisherman era was seen as the root of an extended period of losing and humiliation.
“When I look through that era that I was there, the one thing that was not stable with the Islanders was ownership,” said Rich Pilon, who played with the Islanders for twelve seasons— and under four ownership groups— from 1988 to 1999. “That team didn’t have the stability up top from ownership and money, whatever you want to call it, to put the team in the right direction and keep it there. There was just too much change.”86
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Nearly a quarter century after its inauguration, the failed rebranding of the Islanders presents enduring lessons for the sports industry. The first is that a team should not embark on any sort of rebrand, especially one as drastic as replacing its primary logo, without a period of reflection on the costs and benefits of change as well as research to gauge the opinions of its fan base. The Islanders’ indefensible neglect of standard information- gathering tools, such as focus groups, interviews, and surveys, led the organization to underestimate fans’ affinity for the original logo and downplay the similarity between the new logo and the Gorton’s fisherman. In their haste for a quick payday, the Islanders’
brain trust did not distinguish between selling clothing to consumers who want to update their wardrobe with the latest fashions every season and selling new jerseys to fans with strong emotional attachments to the logo their favorite team had worn for its entire twenty- three- year existence. Even the most basic research would have demonstrated that fans did not associate the original logo with losing to the Rangers in the 1994 playoffs, as Islanders ownership assumed. For most fans the logo conjured fond memories of the franchise’s heyday in the early 1980s, which in turn evoked their own personal feelings of joy from rooting for championship teams that represented the area where they grew up. Sports marketers must appreciate the profound affection that fans feel for the logos of teams they have devoted countless hours, and many dollars, to following.
The second most important lesson from the fisherman logo story involves the redeeming impact of winning. Among the many factors that harmed the rebrand, none were more damaging than the abandonment of the classic logo, which distanced the Islanders from the 185
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rich tradition that fans held dear, and the humiliating resemblance to a frozen seafood mascot, which spawned negative media coverage.
The early mockery of the rebrand placed the Islanders in a defensive position heading into the inaugural season of the fisherman jerseys.
However, as fans made clear in period interviews, the Islanders had a chance to recover on the ice. No matter the aesthetic shortcomings of a uniform, its ultimate success rests in the performance of the team that wears it. The Islanders rebranded at a time when the team was struggling, and the new logo became associated with losing. Due to the superstitious nature of sports, fans blamed the poor performance on the fisherman. The best time to unveil new jerseys is when a team is on the verge of success, as Wayne G
retzky’s Los Angeles Kings were in 1988. Although no team can guarantee a winning season, the Kings had reason to expect deep playoff runs with Gretzky on board, while the Islanders had little hope that their roster of untested rookies and disgruntled veterans would bring a championship to Long Island.
The silver- and- black uniforms came to identify the Kings during an upswing, and fans had little reason to miss the purple and gold worn in leaner times. Alternately, the Islanders’ last- place finishes in 1995– 96 and 1996– 97 made fans long for a return to the logo of their Stanley Cup years.
Another lesson from the fisherman logo story is that rebranding does not concern uniforms alone. A jersey is just one element of a brand. Teams must view the rebranding process as a holistic change within the organization, encompassing everything the team presents to the public as part of its identity, including its history, players, former players, coaches, owners, mascot, and venue. In planning a rebrand, franchises should determine which brand elements are most valued by their fans and retain them, and identify which aspects are less popular and refresh them. The Islanders’ greatest assets in the fisherman era were the dynasty players whom fans held in high regard, but the team underutilized them as ambassadors for the new brand. In fact, the Islanders alienated their alumni by changing jerseys without conferring with most of them and replacing a coach who had played alongside them with a coach who played against and disparaged them.
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Rebrands have a greater chance of success when high- profile former players endorse them, allaying any concern among the fans that their heroes of yesteryear are being pushed aside and aren’t on board with the changes.
The last major lesson concerns the designation of a standard- bearer for a new brand. While teams generally select players to appear in advertisements, the Islanders promoted the fisherman brand primarily through their coach Mike Milbury and later their owner John Spano, whose promise to pump money into the franchise excited the fan base.
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