A rival league, a clothing manufacturer and a name instead of the Ducks.

The New York Islanders were created partly to keep another league out. English Wikipedia says that in 1972 the new World Hockey Association planned to put its New York club, the Raiders, into the brand-new Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Nassau County officials did not regard the WHA as a major league, and the lawyer William Shea, who had helped bring baseball’s Mets to the area a decade earlier, was enlisted to secure an NHL team instead. The New York Rangers initially objected to a neighbour, but their owners at Madison Square Garden were persuaded that a suburban NHL club was preferable to a WHA one.

On 8 November 1971 the NHL awarded a Long Island franchise to Roy Boe, a clothing manufacturer who also owned the New York Nets of the American Basketball Association. Wikipedia says the club unveiled its name on 15 February 1972 at a press conference held across the street from Roosevelt Raceway, at a restaurant owned by the songwriter Burt Bacharach. Wikipedia says it had been expected that the team would borrow the name of the Long Island Ducks, a minor-league club of the Eastern Hockey League; instead it became the Islanders, and local newspapers soon shortened that to “Isles.” Bill Torrey, previously an executive with the California Golden Seals, was named general manager at the same event.

The team began play in the autumn of 1972 at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, which remained its home until 2015. Wikipedia says that after failed attempts to replace or rebuild the Coliseum, the Islanders moved to Barclays Center in Brooklyn from 2015–16, later split their home games between Brooklyn and the renovated Coliseum, and spent the 2020–21 season back in Nassau County.

Ownership has changed several times. Wikipedia says the NHL approved a sale to the businessmen Jon Ledecky and Scott D. Malkin in October 2014, and that they took majority control from Charles Wang at the end of the 2015–16 season, with Wang keeping a share. In December 2020 the ownership group, New York Islanders Hockey Club, L.P., bought the remaining stake from Wang’s estate. Malkin serves as the club’s governor.

A roundel drawn as a map, with a stick for a letter.

The original crest came from the advertising executive John Alogna. Wikipedia describes it as a circle containing the letters “NY” laid over a map of Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island. The lower part of the Y doubles as a hockey stick, with three orange stripes near the bottom of the shaft and a puck beside the blade. The team name runs along the foot of the roundel, and the tip of the “I” is drawn as a point aimed at Uniondale, the site of the Nassau Coliseum.

The colours were royal blue, orange and white from the start. Wikipedia says the debut uniforms of 1972 were traditional in style, a white sweater with orange and royal blue stripes at the waist and sleeves and a royal blue one with white and orange stripes, and that the design changed little until the mid-1990s.

The crest has been adjusted rather than replaced. When the team returned to the roundel in the late 1990s it was recoloured in navy and a brighter orange to match the uniforms of the time. From the 2008–09 season a third jersey brought back royal blue and gave the stick four orange stripes instead of three; that version became the full-time logo in 2010. For the 2014 Stadium Series the club used the “NY” on its own, with a chrome treatment, and simplified versions of that monogram have appeared on later alternate jerseys.

Other details pick up the geography. A blue third jersey introduced for 2018–19 carried a shortened “Y-stick,” a white shoulder yoke, orange numbers recalling the inaugural season and a map of Long Island on the collar, according to Wikipedia. The 2024 Stadium Series jersey set the word “ISLES” in navy inside a broad orange band across the chest. The club’s mascot is Sparky the Dragon, originally a cross-promotion with the New York Dragons of the Arena Football League, who also played at the Coliseum.

Design and documentation.

Hockey clubs often build their marks from things close to home. A crest can take the outline of the land a team plays on, reducing a coastline or an island to a shape simple enough to sit on a shoulder patch or a helmet decal. Weather offers another vocabulary: storm symbols, warning flags and swirling winds translate easily into flat colour and strong silhouettes that read at a distance and on a small screen.

Not every change sticks. A redesign can be introduced with fanfare and withdrawn within a few seasons when supporters push back, and the older mark returns, sometimes slightly refined. Those reversals show how much a logo carries for the people who wear it, and how a club’s visual history becomes part of its brand.

Throwback nights draw on that history directly. Clubs bring out sweaters, colours and logos from earlier eras for a handful of games, and the retail range follows. A new arena adds another layer: concourse graphics, ice markings, signage and naming-rights wordmarks all have to sit alongside the team’s own marks, so the building itself becomes part of how the brand looks on broadcast and in photographs.

The fisherman, his withdrawal and his return as a throwback.

A sharp turn in the club’s visual history came before the 1995–96 season. Wikipedia says the Islanders replaced the roundel with a new logo of a slicker-clad fisherman holding a hockey stick, and the uniforms around it added navy, a brighter orange, teal and grey, a Montauk Lighthouse shoulder patch and uneven stripes shaped like an ocean wave, with the lettering following the same wave. The stated aim was to tie the team more closely to Long Island; Wikipedia adds that the club was also seeking more merchandise revenue.

John Matisz of theScore, writing on 26 January 2023, drew on Nick Hirshon’s 2018 book We Want Fish Sticks: The Bizarre and Infamous Rebranding of the New York Islanders to explain what went wrong. Hirshon described the rebrand as a “comedy of errors.” The logo leaked months before its planned unveiling, and the New York Daily News printed it alongside an article criticising the break from the classic look and pointing out the fisherman’s resemblance to the mascot of Gorton’s frozen seafood. Hirshon told theScore that the club had held no focus groups or fan interviews before finalising the design. Rangers fans took up the chant “We want fish sticks!”

The retreat came quickly. Wikipedia says league rules prevented an immediate change of uniforms, so for 1996–97 the club introduced third jerseys identical to the fisherman sets except that the roundel replaced the fisherman, and those became permanent in 1997–98. theScore notes that the original fisherman was worn for the 1995–96 and 1996–97 seasons. An updated fisherman jersey was worn in warm-ups on 3 February 2015, and for 2022–23 the design returned as the club’s second “Reverse Retro” sweater, with less teal and diagonal orange striping. Hirshon, who did historical research as a consultant for a branding agency on that relaunch, told theScore that younger fans saw the fisherman as cool and retro. The 1990s mascot Nyisles, whose face loosely echoed the fisherman, returned in December 2022.

The club’s home since November 2021 has been UBS Arena, built beside Belmont Park in Elmont, where the roundel and the orange and blue now sit alongside the arena’s naming-rights wordmark.

For a design guide, New York Islanders shows how a crest drawn as a map can carry a club through decades of small revisions, and how a rejected redesign can return as a throwback once enough time has passed. Compare the New York Rangers, the neighbours who had opposed the franchise, the New Jersey Devils and the NHL. For this guide we use island blue, stick orange and harbour navy with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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