Maybe it all would have turned out differently if the Islanders had won a playoff series. Maybe all it would have taken was just getting to the playoffs. Maybe it was all down to the disastrous record and pair of last-place finishes over the two seasons the Islanders used the infamous Fisherman as their primary logo.

Certainly the losing had at least something to do with the backlash back then.

“One of the truisms in sports is that you should rebrand when you expect that you’re gonna go in a winning direction,” Nick Hirshon, a journalism professor at William Paterson University and author of “We Want Fish Sticks,” a book that chronicles the failed rebranding, said in a phone call with Sports+.

The Islanders rebranded off a 15-28-5 lockout-shortened season in 1994-95. That was already one box they failed to check. The rest would come soon enough.