The 1990s New York Islanders: The NHL's Most Dysfunctional Team

The New York Islanders have been one of the NHL's most successful franchises, winning four straight Stanley Cups from 1980-1983. But, during the 1990s, the franchise started to hit a downfall.

Bad decisions made the team become extremely dysfunctional, almost causing the franchise to move away from Long Island.

The New York Islanders have been in a hole since their 1992-1993 miracle postseason run (the last time that they ever won a postseason series).

The year before, Bill Torrey (their general manager since the beginning of franchise history), decided to move on to the Florida Panthers and former New York Ranger Don Maloneytook over. 

After they got swept by the Rangers during their 1994 Stanley Cup championship run in the first round, everything started to fall apart around the team.

Maloney did nothing with the team that made the 1993 postseason run. Instead, he got rid of the good players that were there (Turgeon, Ferraro, etc.) 

Then, the team became worse when legendary coach Al Arbour left the team and went up to the front office. That started a revolving door of coaches that went through the franchise.

After Arbour left, Maloney brought in "Mad Mike" Milbury to become the head coach of the Islanders. During the year, he actually took over Maloney's job after he was fired by the organization, which eventually turned out to be a terrible move by the Islanders.

As the General Manager of the Islanders, Milbury made many terrible trades and acquisitions, almost all of which made the team worse.

The most famous example of this was the 2000 NHL draft, where he traded future superstars Roberto Luongo and Olli Jokinen for Mark Parrish and Oleg Kvasha after choosing Boston University 19-year-old freshman goalie Rick DiPietro with the first overall pick in the draft.

The pick led to the famous quote by Milbury: "As dangerous as this may be, we think Mad Mike maybe has something going for him," which led to the nickname "Mad Mike" for Milbury.

Despite these moves, almost nothing can be as bad as what happened in 1996.

Ownership

During this time, then-owner Jim Pickett wanted to get away from the ownership of the Islanders (which he held for almost 20 years), and decided to retire from hockey.

In came John Spano, who tried to buy the Dallas Stars and the Florida Panthers. It didn't work out for him, and he was forced to go elsewhere. He was recruited in by NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, and was considered to be the savior of the Islanders' franchise.

But, Spano wasn't able to pay Pickett the installments for the cable contract and the additional money owed to Pickett, causing New York newspaper Newsday to do an investigation into him.

It turned out that the league spent only around $500-$750 dollars on his resume, instead of about $30,000 that is usually spent. He also completely lied about his assets; (he claimed to be worth $230 million, but was only worth around $2 million).

Further, he said he owned a major company (the Bison Group) which owned over 6,000 employees (had 22 employees) and lied to everyone by using his charm and his "big bucks."

It turned out he was a complete fraud who brought complete embarrassment to the NHL, and led to better background checks for all future sports owners.

Jersey

During this time, the Islanders decided that it would be a great idea to get redesigned jerseys, to show their fans that this would become a new era of Islanders hockey. 

So, they introduced the dreaded "Gorton's Fisherman" jersey to their fans. It turned out to be one of the ugliest jerseys in sports history. It consisted of a fisherman (who just happened to look a lot like the Gorton's Fisherman), teal waves at the bottom, a sharper shade of orange, and navy blue. 

The jerseys were complete disasters, and the team almost immediately promised to change the jersey as soon as they were allowed to by the NHL. But, despite this, they were completely mocked by everyone: To this day, Rangers fans chant "We want fish sticks" when they play the Islanders.