The thought process was, at the very least, somewhat understandable.
The New York Islanders were more than 10 years removed from their glory years. The superstar, future Hall of Fame players like Denis Potvin and Mike Bossy had been retired for some time. Attendance at their crumbling arena, Nassau Coliseum, was plummeting, as were revenues. And around the corner, the other two NHL organizations were thriving, with the New York Rangers coming off of a Stanley Cup championship in 1994 — pummeling the Islanders in the first round along the way — and the New Jersey Devils capturing the trophy the following season.
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Something had to be done, and it had to involve more than just changes to the roster and coaching staff.
Regarding the latter, the Islanders did make quite a splashy move. They fired coach Lorne Henning on May 3, 1995 after just one unproductive season, opening the door for Mike Milbury, then a 43-year-old hockey analyst with ESPN and someone well-known for his fiery demeanor both on and off the ice. This was a guy who was involved in some heated battles with those late 1970s and early 1980s Islanders during his playing days in Boston as a Bruins defenseman, and who once climbed into the stands during a gong show of a brawl and infamously beat a fan with his own shoe, for crying out loud.
The undermanned Islanders, just 15-28-5 in the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season (the second-worst record in the league), were going to have to scratch and claw if they were going to improve in 1995-96, with a young roster devoid of elite-level talent. Milbury, the thinking went, was the perfect personality to instill that kind of scrappy attitude into the inexperienced group.
And, he was a marvelous choice to be the face of their massive rebranding effort, as the Islanders suddenly moved away from their classic blue and orange logo, featuring a map of Long Island and a hockey stick, to a menacing fisherman in a teal slicker and hat with a fierce, angry scowl painted across his face.
GM Don Maloney introduces new head coach Mike Milbury on July 5, 1995 (Photo: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)When Milbury was introduced as the new coach in a press conference on July 5, 1995, standing at a podium and in front of a backdrop with the new logo, while wearing a windbreaker adorned with the fisherman on the upper left, it had to be an exciting time, regardless of the long road back to respectability ahead.
Right?
“No, it wasn’t exciting,” Milbury said. “For me, obviously getting the job was exciting, but I’m a traditionalist. This is an organization that was (about) a decade removed from one of the great runs in Stanley Cup history. I didn’t see the need for a dramatic change. But, it was a fait accompli when I got there.”
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He continued: “I’m sure there were some people that thought it was interesting, but there were a lot of people that I found pushing back. But there was not much anybody could do at that point.”
One of the strangest eras of Islanders hockey, and in recent NHL history, was underway.
There is no greater authority on the Fisherman Era than Nick Hirshon, a journalism professor at William Paterson University and who authored a book about the two seasons the Islanders wore that logo. “We Want Fishsticks” was released four years ago, on Dec. 1, 2018.
“It’s one of the most colorful, bizarre, infamous eras that any hockey team has experienced, mixed in with some good times, but a lot more negative,” Hirshon said. “It’s kind of impossible to think that a professional sports franchise today would commit some of the same mistakes and experience some of the same fan backlash without responding sooner. But I think it was a real product of the times, before sports branding became more sophisticated, before social media existed, at a time when you could maybe get away with doing some things and fly under the media radar.”
What is evident is that the Islanders’ front office didn’t do nearly enough research before making the sudden switch from the logo that fans associated with one of the greatest hockey teams of all time to whatever this was. Not only was the logo different, but the sweater featured a wavy design all around, including some dizzying numbering and lettering on the back.
From a hockey standpoint, the 1994 first-round loss to the Rangers was particularly jarring. Not only did the Islanders lose all four games, but they were also outscored a combined 22-3 in the four defeats. Along with their subsequent miserable campaign under Henning, as well as the fact that general manager Don Maloney traded away a number of popular players like Pierre Turgeon in April 1995, team ownership and management started to associate that classic logo with the recent failures rather than the championship seasons a little more than a decade earlier.
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“They really didn’t do any focus groups or interviews with fans,” Hirshon said. “The only thing that I could come up with in my book that even amounts to close to research is one of the Islanders executives (Tim Beach) went to Quinnipiac University and held up the jersey to a class that he was speaking to and asked the students, ‘Hey, do you guys like this, or not?’ He said it was kind of mixed results.”
“If they had done focus groups,” Hirshon continued, “fans would have said we like the original logo. We don’t want to see that gone. … And, fans would have noticed it looks a lot like the Gorton’s fisherman.”
If they didn’t notice the resemblance to that fictional frozen fish pitchman, there were plenty of people around who could quickly point it out.
Chris Botta, who worked for the Islanders for 20 years in public relations, was with the team during the rebranding effort. While he believes the logo never had any real chance of succeeding, it was pretty well doomed from the start when the New York Daily News got ahold of it. The paper even slapped the fisherman on Potvin. “Here’s what Denis Potvin would have looked like with the new ‘fish sticks’ logo on his sweater,” read the caption.
“It was never going to work. We get that,” Botta said. “But all they had was the logo instead of the uniform and the jersey — and they took that logo and they put it on Denis’ chest. From that moment on, there was nothing anybody could do. The reaction was fiercely negative.”
Milbury, too, got the sense that most of his players were not all that enthralled with the new look.
“I don’t think the players liked it at all,” Milbury said. “I don’t think they had any affinity for the fisherman jersey. The Islanders uniform was a classy uniform, I thought. It was simple and straightforward, and not schticky at all. And this was the ultimate schtick.”
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He added: “I got the sense that they were like, geez, what the hell. And the fact that we were not a very good team made us fodder for all sorts of verbal abuse from opponents and fans.”
This was the case, particularly at Madison Square Garden.
The tables had recently turned with the two New York franchises. For years, the Rangers and their fans had to endure the “1940! 1940!” chant from Islanders fans and in other East Coast buildings around the league, referring to the 54-year drought that the Blueshirts endured between Stanley Cup championships. Their win in 1994 put an abrupt end to that.
Now, perhaps feeling emboldened, Rangers fans quickly seized on a “We want fishsticks!” chant, serenading the Islanders on their many visits to the World’s Most Famous Arena.
“I do remember the Garden just being ruthless about it,” recalled Jamie McLennan, then still a young goaltender trying to establish himself in the league. “When they won it in ’94, that was my first year. And they just dummied us. They outscored us (22-3) in a sweep, and it was a bloodbath. I remember fans fighting in the stands, and the Rangers rolled right to the Cup. They were that good of a team. So then fast forward, we switch jerseys and stuff, and the Rangers are coming off a Cup. They were feeling it.”
Said Botta: “It was tough on the Islanders fans. … (The Rangers) won their Cup now. The one thing the Islanders fans had was 1940. Now, they don’t really have that. ‘We want fishsticks’ took on a life of its own.”
There are varying opinions on whether the logo might have had a fighting chance to succeed had the Islanders simply been a better team. Winning cures many ills, and the Islanders weren’t able to do that, on top of being a generally dysfunctional franchise at that point. In the two seasons they wore the fisherman, the Islanders were a combined 51-91-22 (although they brought back the original crest for select games in that second season).
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Milbury lasted just a season and a half behind the bench before moving into Maloney’s vacated general manager’s office midway through the 1995-96 season, appointing Rick Bowness as head coach. Meanwhile, Milbury was instructed by team ownership to shave payroll.
“That meant goodbye Wendel Clark, goodbye Mathieu Schneider,” Milbury recalled of having to deal away that pair of key contributors to Toronto. “That was the only way to do it — the highest paid guys on the team, and maybe the most popular guys on the team.”
“Everybody likes success,” Milbury continued, “and that may have overshadowed some of the distaste for (the fisherman). But we’ll never know, will we?”
Hirshon believes a winning record and a more stable franchise might have allowed it to survive.
“I think if they had started to win a lot, people would have been more forgiving,” he said. “I don’t know how much it would have caught on, but I do think that could have happened.”
Still, not everyone hated, or still hates, the fisherman logo. While some of the older players on the team in 1995-96 like Darius Kasparaitis and Travis Green, who had worn the classic Islanders logo a few years earlier never seemed to be fully on board with it, McLennan actually didn’t mind the look.
“I’m in a minority, I actually like it,” he said. “I got this cool set of gear to match it. I had these teal pads that matched the color. I thought my gear set up was really cool.”
Still, McLennan said, “I was ignorant, and I’ll fully admit that, to how much (the classic logo) meant to the history of the franchise and the fanbase.”
It’s that history that makes the logo so beloved.
“All these traditional team names — cats, tigers, lions — the Islanders can never really have that,” Botta said. “So we have this stick, with (the map of) Long Island…and it probably wouldn’t have lasted, but Bobby Nystrom and (Clark) Gillies and (Bill) Torrey and (Al) Arbour got in the way, and that’s what makes that logo great. We can debate whether it’s a good logo or not; it’s iconic because they made it iconic.”
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And while that original Islanders crest isn’t going anywhere, the logo that was so controversial when it was launched is now back.
The Islanders will debut their “reverse retro” jersey on Saturday at UBS Arena when they host the Carolina Hurricanes. They are the last of the 32 NHL teams to debut its version, and it will be the first of six times they will wear it this season. Although the colors don’t exactly match the original, the fisherman is alive and well on the front, now wearing an Islanders-orange slicker rather than teal. It’s much less busy than the original, too, although there is a hint of teal in both the stick that the fisherman is holding and the subtle waves beneath him.
Scott Mayfield is aware of the history associated with the fisherman. In fact, he came across Hirshon’s book on social media a few years back, read it cover to cover, and the two met in person and grabbed lunch together in 2019.
“When I was drafted here (in 2011) I knew about the four Cups, but that’s about it,” Mayfield said. “I didn’t know a lot about the history. It was nice to brush up on some of the darker days that you don’t really hear about that much. There’s so many unique stories about the Islanders.”
Mayfield also figures that to the younger generation — and, at age 30, he’s not among those that would have seen any of the Islanders’ dynasty-era teams — the fisherman is not looked upon with the ire and outrage that exists with some of the older fans. After all, many fans proudly wear the fisherman jersey at home games already.
“You look at the people that wanted the fisherman jersey, it’s a younger group,” Mayfield said. “Their parents watched the Cup games, and now they are Islanders fans. The fan base on Long Island is tight-knit, they pass it down through generations. The rebrand didn’t go the right way, but now I think us putting it on, it’s a nice little spark, I think, to kind of change it up.”
Nick Pizzutello is the executive vice president of New York Hockey holdings. Unlike the previous time the fisherman was launched, Pizzutello indicated that the organization did much more research before deciding to bring back its controversial logo.
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Still, they had plenty of evidence that it was, and is, going to go over well. The Islanders have continued to sell merchandise adorned with the fisherman logo even before they revealed the new sweater, and, according to Pizzutello, it “flies off the shelf.”
The previous iteration of the Islanders’ reverse retro sweater in 2020 was a flimsy effort that didn’t look much different than what they were already wearing. It was a missed opportunity that they weren’t going to repeat now for their 50th anniversary season.
“From ownership, management, the whole team, it was all about listening to the fans and what they wanted to see, and seeing what the hockey guys and what the players like, and making sure that we were embracing that logic,” Pizzutello said. “If you look back to the last round of the reverse retro (significant) fan feedback was, we want the fisherman. Going back to Day 1, (Islanders co-owner) Jon Ledecky has said he’s a steward of the team, and it’s really the fans that own the team. That was what drove the decision-making process to bring it back.”
Pizzutello is well aware that some older Islanders fans would still prefer the fisherman drowned at sea, never to return again. In redesigning the old look, the club did its best to marry the fisherman with the contemporary colors and brand in order to appease everyone.
“Collectively we all wanted to evolve the jersey beyond what it was, and make it more streamlined, reduce some of the intense waviness, make it more with a flair of teal instead of something in your face, and make it kind of the modern version for the future of the fisherman that young fans and hopefully more traditional fans would both embrace,” he said.
Pizzutello even reached out to the celebrity wing of the Islanders’ fan base, too. Ralph Macchio, according to Pizzutello, wasn’t all that interested in seeing the fisherman make a return, but now that he’s seen the updated look, he approves.
Pizzutello also shipped the new sweater to Kevin Connolly, star of the hit HBO show “Entourage” and who directed the documentary “Big Shot,” chronicling the John Spano ownership debacle that happened shortly after the rebranding, in October 1996. Connolly, who grew up on Long Island and was in his early 20s during the fisherman era, said his initial instinct when he heard of that logo’s return was “to have a pit in my stomach.”
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Upon taking the reverse retro sweater out of the box in Los Angeles, though, he grew to like it — as did some of the younger hockey fans in his office.
“It’s the best version of the fisherman jersey that could ever be made, which still maintaining the initial idea, which was the fisherman,” Connolly said. “So, yeah, I’m into it. I like it. The younger people have sold me on it.”
He continued: “As miserable as that period of time was, you’ve gotta just put that behind us, man. It was a bad couple years. But we got the new building. We’ve got everything we ever wanted. Now, let’s play some hockey.”
Hirshon looks favorably at the organization giving the fisherman another shot. After all, love it or hate it, it’s a part of the team’s history.
“I think if you want to move past an era that has a lot of negative associations, you can’t just whitewash it and forget about it, and expect that people are going to suddenly stop mentioning the jersey at games, or mentioning the jersey on social media,” he said. “For two years it was the primary logo that identified your franchise. … Of course there’s going to be controversy, but that’s how we move past these things, by discussing them, not by trying to ignore them.”
As for the man that is most associated with the logo, even he’s on board with it coming back.
Kind of.
“A handful of games, I guess everybody can have a chuckle over it,” Milbury said. “But if they were bringing it back for a full rebrand, that would be a different story.”
(Top photo: New York Islanders)
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