As the New York Islanders enter their final season in Nassau Coliseum, their impending move to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in the midst of an ownership transition represents both a monumental challenge and an opportunity for a much-needed rejuvenation.
The team’s marketing efforts are split between a coliseum-based staff focused on celebrating the final campaign on Long Island and the Barclays Center group with an eye on the transition to Brooklyn for 2015-16.
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Merchandise features a patch honoring the team’s four Stanley Cup victories.
Photo by: New York Islanders |
“We’re closing one chapter of a great story and opening another one in 2015,” said Tom O’Grady, president of Chicago-based Gameplan Creative, the agency behind the Brooklyn-focused effort. “There’s no reason to cross wires there.”
There’s more than a move in the works. Islanders owner Charles Wang has agreed to sell a stake in the team to former Washington Capitals co-owner Jon Ledecky and London-based investor Scott Malkin. Their group, pending league approval, will become minority stakeholders and within two years will transition into the majority ownership role.
The emphasis for 2014-15 is on honoring the team’s history. That homage to the team’s glory days, particularly its four-championship dynasty of the early 1980s, could help reinvigorate a once-proud fan base that has not experienced a playoff series victory since 1993, said longtime sports communications professional Joe Favorito, a Brooklyn native and former New York Knicks vice president of public relations. The Islanders have ranked in the bottom five in NHL attendance each year since the 2004-05 lockout, having made only two brief playoff appearances in that span.
“It is kind of a dormant tradition from when they won the Cup, but those are the people who can buy the tickets: people that vividly remember the parades down Hempstead Turnpike,” Favorito said. “Those are the people that you want to bring back.”
The Islanders have already announced plans to pay tribute to three of the six core players from their Stanley Cup
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| Barclays Center is building excitement for the move to Brooklyn for the 2015-16 season. |
years, each of whom will have his own pregame ceremony and corresponding giveaway during the first half of the season.
The team plans to do the same for the other three players during the second half of the season. One of those greats, Mike Bossy, also will be a part-time studio analyst on MSG Networks’ Islanders telecasts this season. Kimber Auerbach, the Islanders’ director of communications, said plans are also in the works to bring back several other players from different eras of the team’s history, and said season tickets will bear scenes from Islanders history.
The team has rolled out a line of “Tradition On Ice” merchandise, featuring an image of Nassau Coliseum with the four Stanley Cups in the background. Islanders players will wear an identical patch on their jerseys.
Terry Goldstein, the Islanders’ director of retail operations, said the team also will release an apparel collection featuring the infamous fisherman logo the team wore during the 1996 season before switching back to its original crest. In addition, fans who buy jerseys at the Nassau Coliseum team store will have the option of orange lettering, which the team wore on its original uniforms.
Meanwhile in Brooklyn, the Barclays Center staff has taken on the responsibility of building excitement for next season, though those efforts are in their early stages. Barclays Center in March hired Gameplan to develop a campaign to serve as a bridge between the team’s past and future.
O’Grady said the initiative will consist of two phases, the first of which is underway and targets existing Islanders fans. A more forward-looking second phase, which likely won’t be rolled out until later this season, will target a broader audience in and around New York City’s five boroughs.
The current phase centers on the slogan, “Tradition Has A New Home.” Ads bearing the motto have been placed in 370 Long Island Rail Road cars and plug the team’s Friday preseason game at Barclays Center against the New Jersey Devils, for which about 10,000 fans are expected. The creative features Islanders captain John Tavares in the foreground with monochromatic images from the team’s Stanley Cup celebrations behind him.
Barclays Center COO Fred Mangione said his staff has limited season-ticket sales for 2015-16 thus far to current Islanders subscribers and is taking a similar approach to suite sales and corporate sponsorships. The arena will hold a select-a-seat event prior to Friday’s preseason game to give Long Islanders in particular a chance to familiarize themselves with the building. Efforts to sell tickets to the rest of the public won’t begin until October at the earliest, and the big push will correspond with the marketing campaign’s second phase.
Mangione stressed the importance of drawing from the city — building from Brooklyn out to boroughs like Queens and Staten Island — as well as bringing fans in on the LIRR. He said his staff has been working closely with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees both the LIRR and the city’s subway system, to make that experience as easy as possible for Islanders fans used to driving to games. He added that early signs are strong, as a recent Luke Bryan concert at the arena drew 15 percent of its audience from Nassau County and another 10 percent from Suffolk.
The LIRR shuffles hundreds of thousands of commuters between Long Island and New York City on an average weekday. Favorito said those commuters — many of whom can go from work in Manhattan to Barclays Center via subway in under a half hour and then ride the rail directly back to Long Island — are likely to be early adopters of the Islanders in Brooklyn.
“They’re the people that are going to come first,” Favorito said. “Those are the people that are literally going by your building because of the Long Island Rail Road every day.”
Alex Silverman writes for sister publication SportsBusiness Daily.
