Quote Originally Posted by Gill The Thrill View Post
The Rangers get 18,000 a game, every game for many years. It's solid in the marketplace. They don't get the press that the Yankees get, but so don't the NY Knicks in the NBA or even the Giants, Jets and the Mets when they are not playing well. (Actually the Giants as the older NFL team get plenty of coverage, but New York City is known as a baseball town because of its history and is also home to two minor league baseball teams, along with their MLB teams)

At one time the Rangers and the Islanders used to sellout every game. The Devils never, but it's across the Hudson River in Jersey, so they should be trying to entice a different market. As for Queens, it was only one ignorant politician, who happens to be African American who said, "Keep that white sport out of Queens," in referring to hockey. Could you imagine if the shoe was reversed, (not that it should be) and someone who wasn't black defined basketball in the same way this clown defined hockey...it would be on the front pages and leading the national newscasts of all the networks for a week. Maybe that politician should ask how terrible a sport hockey has been to Dustin Byfuglien, Grant Fuhr, Charlie Huddy or Tony McKegney and many other black people who've played pro hockey to find out what they think about his opinion.

Queens' is a very multicultural, pluralistic community. I'm sure there are people who can't relate to hockey or downright hate it, but conversely there are many who I'm sure like the sport. There has been an influx of Eastern Europeans from hockey playing countries who've immigrated to Queens and Brooklyn in the last 20 years, which is a reason cited for why the Islanders moved into the Barclays Center, as the Brooklyn Nets and the arena is owned by a Russian billionaire. The market is there, probably closer to Queens and closer to the long-time Islander fan base, but it's there.
Seeing as how LLB997 lives (or has lived in NewYork), I would personally defer to him on knowledge of that market.