E.L. wrote:
For the Islanders to de-thrown the Yankees as kings of NY sports, they'd have to launch into a dynasty era that makes the 1980 dynasty look lucky. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to hear the Isles talked about on main stream news, but there's no way they will ever supplant the Yankees as the biggest team in NY. Even if you take the Yankees away, the NY football teams have much larger fan bases, even when they suck.
It's a stereotype, but lots of NYers are split like this- Yankees/Giants/Rangers/Knicks vs Mets/Jets/Nets/Isles, and that's often the order they rate their rooting interests. I couldn't imagine being solely in that last group.
Thankfully for me, when I can be bothered with baseball I'm a Yankee fan. I couldn't care less about football. I liked the attitude the mid-90s Knicks had with Oakley and Mason, but they totally changed after those guys left and I'm back to not caring at all about basketball.
And it's nice to see Wyshinski, who I miss from the Puck Daddy days, talking to Don LaGreca, who is one of two guys on ESPN NY who talks hockey at all. The other being DiPietro. I still don't get why the 2 of them don't have a hockey show, other than the fact that almost nobody in NY gives a shit about hockey (percentage wise anyway). Even mid-summer, there's lots of football talk. Baseball talk in winter. Basketball is a distant third and hockey is like "ohhhhh yeah, there's that other sport that like 14 of you weirdos are really into. We don't understand why." When Max Kellerman had a radio show on ESPN NY I called him because he was saying hockey is dumb. I asked him if there was a sport that involved power, high speed, huge hits, grace, extreme violence, incredible agility and a 4-round playoff system, would he watch it. He sounded like he knew it was a trap and said "I gueeeeeess, what is it?" And I said "it's hockey, which you keep bagging on. You probably just haven't watched with the right people." He watched a bit more and eventually pandered to hockey fans for a while. The station was 1050 AM, so he did a "hockey rant at 10:50 on 1050". He did it for a while, but eventually turned it into a Mets rant the following spring and predictably, got like 50x the callers. Mets fans love to bitch about their team more than any other fan base. If I recall correctly, he gave it the very unPC name "the battered Mets fan hotline".
Even in the dynasty days, I don't think the Isles were kings of NY sports. If Bossy had walked onto the subway, probably a handful of people would have recognized him. If a Yankees utility infielder got on that same subway he'd be mobbed.
By the way, I'd like to point out that with the Edmonton and Toronto arenas being considered "home" for some games, the Isles probably have a world record for most home arenas by a team in a single season with 4- Nassau Coliseum, Barclays, Toronto and Edmonton.