After failed Brooklyn try, Islanders make return home to Long Island
After spending much of the past six-plus seasons playing through various obstacles at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, the Islanders are finally skating home.
The long-vagabond franchise will face off Saturday against the Flames at UBS Arena in Elmont on Long Island, marking the Islanders’ debut in their new $1.1 billion arena. And, as expected, fans can’t wait for their beloved club to hit the ice.
“Barclays Center served its purpose, but Islander fans deserved better,” said Gary Harding, a longtime season-ticket holder and vice president of the New York Islanders Booster Club. “The Islanders have always been the identity of Long Island. It’s in our name, and it’s important to have something to call our own.”
The new arena offers about 17,250 seats for hockey and up to 19,000 for concerts. It features 56 luxury boxes, outdoor terraces, lounges, clubs and plenty of other amenities.
While Harding and the rest of the team’s rabid fan base can’t wait to chant “Yes! Yes! Yes!” the first time Mathew Barzal or another Islander scores a goal in the new building, about 20 miles away in Brooklyn, there’s hardly been a peep about losing the Islanders.
In fact, Brooklyn Borough President and Mayor-elect Eric Adams all but said the Islanders couldn’t leave fast enough in December 2017 after the team’s owners and development partners secured state approval for the rights to build the new arena on grounds next to Belmont Park racetrack.
“There’s only one #Brooklyn team for @Barclays Center and that’s the @BrooklynNets,” Adams then tweeted. “We wish the @NYIslanders well on their journey to Belmont and they should consider Nassau Coliseum in the interim period.”
The Islanders left Brooklyn as quietly as possible: a 6-2 drubbing to the Canadiens on March 3, 2020, in front of 12,788 fans — unknowingly days before the state went into lockdown because of the COVID-pandemic.
When the NHL resumed in August 2020, it was limited to two “bubble” arenas in Canada to help prevent the virus’ spread. The Islanders went on a spirited run before losing in the Eastern Conference finals.
The club played last season at their former longtime home of Nassau Coliseum and opened this season on a grueling 13-game road trip while waiting for the UBS Arena to be ready for prime time.
After nearly a decade of planning and overcoming legal battles, Barclays Center opened in 2012 as Brooklyn welcomed the former New Jersey Nets as the arena’s flagship team. The Nets’ arrival also marked the much-anticipated return of major league pro sports to the borough for the first time since the Dodgers infamously fled to Los Angeles following the 1957 season.
When the Islanders surprisingly announced plans a month later to join the Nets as Barclays’ tenants beginning in 2015 by agreeing to a 25-year lease agreement, it looked like another win for Brooklyn: suddenly having two major league pro sports teams while in the midst of a huge resurgence as one of America’s most popular places to live and work.
“The whole world knows Brooklyn is big-time, and now we have the big-league sports to prove it,” then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg said during an October 2012 press conference welcoming the Islanders to the Big Apple.
Barclays Center developer and ex-Nets minority owner Bruce Ratner, then-Islanders owner Charles Wang and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman also insisted the move was a big win for the league and New York.
In the end, it was poorly received by both fans and Brooklyn.
Unlike the Nets, the Islanders made little effort trying to connect with Brooklyn and the rest of New York City. The team rarely traveled to the city to hold public events with players to draw new fans.
Former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who played a big role in lobbying for the Nets to move to Brooklyn, said he initially had high hopes the Islanders would be a huge success in Brooklyn.
He criticized the team for failing to tap into a larger fan base by reaching out to communities of color in urban neighborhoods, rather than just rely on its predominantly white, middle- and upper-class suburban fan base.
“The team never invested itself in Brooklyn,” he said. “I thought they had a great opportunity to build a loyal fan base in New York City and Brooklyn, but it was very obvious in a very short period of time they had no interest. They had no interest!”
Although the Islanders sported one of the NHL’s top home records playing in Brooklyn, they ranked among the bottom of the league in attendance while playing there.
Eric McClure, a neighborhood activist who lives near the arena, attributed the poor attendance in part to Brooklyn hockey fans like himself mostly being Rangers fans.
The Islanders’ longtime fan base, who predominantly live on Long Island, regularly complained about obstructed views, increased ticket prices, longer commutes and that their beloved team was now playing in an arena not built for hockey.
Barclays Center was originally retrofitted to accommodate hockey, but architect Frank Gehry’s design was scrapped and replaced with a cheaper design by the team of Ellerbe Becket and SHoP Architects. It included trimming 200,000 square feet off the Gehry proposal to cut costs during the 2008 economic recession.
The arena’s main scoreboard hovers from atop the middle of the building’s interior, which puts it above center court for basketball games and center stage for concerts. For hockey, that same scoreboard hovered out of place above the west-end blue line, rather than over center ice, because Barclays Center was built to service the smaller dimensions of a basketball court.
Islanders brass routinely complained about arena maintenance, including slushy ice conditions that led to injuries to some of its star players.
Reps from Ratner’s development company asked Wang if he was interested in having the Islanders join the Nets in Brooklyn before breaking ground in 2010 on Barclays Center, but Wang declined because he was all in on his $3.8 billion “Lighthouse Project” mixed-use development that included revamping and modernizing a then-crumbling Nassau Coliseum, a source familiar with the talks said.
The source insisted Barclays would have been better equipped for hockey if Ratner knew the Islanders were coming to Brooklyn.
The Islanders and Barclays Center declined comment.
After Wang’s Lighthouse Project was stonewalled by Nassau County politicians, he tried to convince Nassau voters to approve $400 million in public funding to help the Islanders build a new arena. In August 2011, that plan was rejected through a referendum, setting up the move to Brooklyn.
By the time the Islanders played their first game at Barclays Center in October 2015, Wang was in the process of transferring ownership of the team over to Jon Ledecky and Scott Malkin.
The new ownership group soon made it known they had their sights set on building a new arena on Long Island.
Barclays Center officials also wanted to break the Islanders lease early. They soon realized their arena could make more money using the 40-plus dates set aside for hockey to fill the building with larger-drawing concerts and other attractions. In 2016, The Post reported both sides were looking to get out of the 25-year deal — less than a year into the contract.
Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said it was an “enormous blow” to Long Island when the team moved to Brooklyn, so he “can’t wait” to hit UBS Arena for a game with his 9-year-old son Michael.
“It’s huge,” Bellone said. “This is a great homecoming for Islander fans, and something we’ve been waiting on for a long time.”
