Bartender praises Islanders' "well-behaved fans" during busy game nights; visitor on off-night finds streets "shrugging"

Tonight is the first home game of their second-round playoff series for the New York Islanders (vs. the Tampa Bay Lightning), and the Record, in Islanders' playoff run a boon for Brooklyn's Barclays Center, finds good cheer in a small sample size.

That includes The Montrose bar on Fifth Avenue, McMahon’s Public House, Artichoke Pizza, and Patsy’s Pizzeria, whose manager Gennaro Chimienti cites "high volume and... ‘Let’s Go Islanders’ chants,” more enthusiastic than Nets fans.

“They draw in a much bigger crowd than the Nets do,” said bartender Avi Gould of The Montrose. “There’s no real hit for us from the Nets. The Islanders fans are fun, they’re passionate. And, they are well-behaved fans. As crazy as it gets, they all have good bar etiquette.”

Well-behaved, perhaps, when ordering a pint. Less so after a victory while walking the neighborhood.

A NetsDaily summary of that article, pointing to the likelihood that Barclays will be defined by Islanders rather than Nets fans, noted that there have been neighborhood complaints about hockey fan behavior, and linked to my coverage. Which prompted the following comments (so far):

And on an off night

In Splice Today's piece Island Nation, Spike Vrusho looked for fandom during an Islanders away game, observing that "as the Islanders began round two of their Stanley Cup playoff run last week, the streets around the venue shrugged."

He went to McMahon’s, where "a half-dozen Islanders fans [were] wearing jerseys and peering up at first period action on one of 13 televisions, 11 of which were showing the hockey game." The second-floor beer garden was empty.

"Sure, McMahon’s had an autographed Islanders hockey stick in a case along the wall," he writes, "but like much of the neighborhood support detritus, there was an off-putting 'newness' to it all." That's because the Islanders fans come mainly from out of town.

The Montrose had six TVs showing the game but only six customers. " I ask about O’Connor’s"--the scruffy bar that occupied the pre-McMahon's space--"and get blank stares." 

In Fort Greene, at "a generic sports bar called Mullane’s," he remembered how in 1998 it was "a bodega run by two brothers from Yemen who had pictures of their homestead carved out of the side of a mountain overlooking the valley of Shibam."

The whole piece is worth a read.