Good Morning, Islanders Country.
Today’s edition features a contribution from former VP of Communications and founder of Islanders Point Blank, Chris Botta, along with a bonus Q&A with President of Business Operations, Kelly Cheeseman.
What’s The Deal?
by Chris Botta
The morning after a blissful Islanders home opener, the club pushed out a social media and email promotion offering 30 percent off select tickets to the six remaining home games in October. The deal is available until 7:30 tonight.
It starts with Thursday’s game against the still-rebuilding Blackhawks and culminates with a Halloween matchup against Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, and whoever the Oilers dress up to be a goaltender.
Who doesn’t like a deal? As Peter DeBoer says, Matthew Schaefer is worth the price of admission – and now that price has been slashed for six games. At worst, it offsets some of your costs to park, take the train, or buy the gummy bears.
Although the Islanders had similar promotions after shutouts last season, the timing of this year's offer still surprised me. The Islanders had played just one home game, and they played it magnificently.
Putting a 30 percent off promotion in the marketplace this early is most certainly not a crisis, but it’s notable. It also felt familiar.
For most of my time working for the team, Octobers brought angst. Depending on the season, we usually had between 5,000 and 8,000 season ticket holders, and expectations ranged from hopeless to more like this year’s: if several things fall into place, they can contend for a playoff berth.
In those conference rooms at the old barn on Hempstead Turnpike or at 1535 Old Country Road in the Charles Wang era, desperation ran high by Columbus Day. Crazy ideas were born.
Seats for students were available 90 minutes before faceoff for $15 (“Don’t have an ID, middle-aged dude in the Dead t-shirt? That’s OK.”)
We’d run ads in Newsday offering good seats for weekend games for $30. I vividly remember visiting my wife Catherine in the stands as we were playing the Thrashers on a Saturday night, looking around the Coliseum and thinking, “Good, we can get away with announcing over 11,000.”
There was the game in 2003 when you got in free and got to parade on the ice at intermission if you dressed like Santa. Oh unholy night.
Of course, it’s different today in Islanders Country.
The season ticket base has grown. The corporate business of suites and partnerships has come a long way from the days of asking that beautiful, healthy scratch Sven Butenschon to do autograph signings. The Islanders have a world-class arena with all the potential to generate revenue.
I like the 30 percent deal for the opening weeks of this season of uncertainty because if you’re a hockey fan and have the time and resources to go, every opportunity to see Schaefer at this stage is something you’ll always remember. Schaefer is Denis Potvin on Red Bull.
To the Islanders’ credit, they’ve done a very good job over the last 18 months bringing fans closer to the team. But every conversation about a sports team and ticket sales begins and ends with the notion that all that matters is winning. You can hold jersey-design contests. You can bring unmatched access. You can run creative promotions. It all helps around the edges. Fans ultimately want a winner. And the Islanders know it.
Islanders fans are rooting for the day it’s hard to get a ticket for every game at UBS Arena. It won’t happen because of a marketing campaign, but because the Islanders are Cup contenders again.
As I started writing this piece, I reached out to the Islanders’ corporate communications department to ask if someone would like to spend 15 minutes educating us about the ticket offer and other business strategies for this season.
Here is my conversation from Monday afternoon with Islanders President of Business Operations Kelly Cheeseman:
After such a successful Home Opener, why pull the trigger on Sunday morning on a discount for the rest of the home schedule in October?
The goal is to build momentum by celebrating key moments and special milestones. We had shutout promotions last year, and we want to continue to do it on select games. Historically, the October games are a little bit slower. We are expecting up to three sellouts this month, which is great. The promotion allows tickets to move, and we’ve isolated the sections that we’re able to put a discount in place and still protect our season ticket members. We don’t expect to do them as many times this year. I don’t know that we’ll do it after every shutout this season. But we had a good chance to put it in place already for this year. These offers also won’t always need to be tied to a specific jersey number.
So if New Jersey got a late goal off Sorokin, there would not have been a promotion?
That’s correct.
Do you have a sense of how the shutout promotion has gone since Sunday morning?
They usually sell a few hundred tickets. They’re not like blowing out the doors, but it helps.
The franchise has UBS Arena and a lot of great things going for it. But October has always been a challenging month. So is part of this also to bring some more energy into the building, get more people in the seats – maybe win some new fans and they see Schaefer, Sorokin and everybody else and they come back?
Absolutely. As you noted, October is notoriously slower. Tickets are always hot for the home opener, hot on some weekends, but a little bit slower when people are into their fall scheduling. There’s a lot going on with baseball and football, and with basketball starting. So it often takes a bit of a promotion to get people’s attention and give them a reason, and this is a reason.
Over the last 18 months, everything has opened up around the Islanders. Access to the players. The “On the Island” series. Cameras in the locker room. High-level social media. The marketing to prospective fans that you have discussed in earlier interviews. Schaefer also makes a big difference. Do you have data to show that business and engagement continue to rise?
The biggest metric I can share with you is that we had 96% renewal with our season ticket base from last year to this season. We also have a 30 percent increase in the female audience year-over-year at the NHL and for the Islanders. So we are proud to say that we have had success in generating a larger fanbase. I think it’s noticeable when you come to the arena. We are seeing that audience grow. And now it’s our job to continue to capture it.
At my request, the Islanders later sent over some data to reflect the 2025-26 season over the year before:
• Impressions: 2.85x increase
• Engagements: 2.5x increase
• App Downloads: +54%
• Web Users: +42%
And on the corporate side?
We’re expecting to be up more than 10 percent this year across the board.
As a veteran of this industry, you know that any time someone writes an article like this, many of the replies say, “All that matters is winning.” How do you see your job when you can’t control how many times the Islanders win?
Our job is to be entertaining and exciting about our team beyond what happens on the ice. The willingness of Mathieu Darche and Peter DeBoer to help us tell stories has been crucial. And I know Mathieu sees things the same way I do. I have two kids and a wife, and he has a couple of kids and a wife, so we kind of see the world through their eyes at times. It helps us. They give us some critical input about things we’re doing.
Does your vision for what you’re doing off the ice align with Darche when he talks about Aitcheson and Eklund and Eiserman and everyone else you have? You’re not just thinking about these next six home games in October but what the next couple of years look like, yes?
I’m thinking about the next five years. That’s been the way I’ve approached this job since I started. We’ve got to get younger with our next generation of fans as quickly as possible while making sure that we support our core fan base and take them with us. But it’s the next generation of fans that we have to grow. That’s what’s critical about what we do with the way that we approach our marketing, our content and creative, the way we handle our merchandise, so that the next generation of Islanders fans are even younger and more diverse and more female along with growing our audience. That’s what’s going to make a difference. Whether we lift that Stanley Cup in three years or four years, you see the difference. I think you have already seen the difference just in one year.
There is a big impact from the content. The NHL is also doing a great job with its core marketing plan. What’s going on with “Heated Rivalry” and “Off Campus” and the buzz we saw after the Olympics has been outstanding.
The Islanders fan heartbeat is very healthy, and now we’ve got to continue to take the heartbeat into the arena. Making sure that converts into actual attendance is really important. People are watching, listening, and engaging in big numbers, and hopefully we continue to see great attendance here throughout the fall.
