An Owner With Some Eyebrow-Raising Moves
On the day he elevated Garth Snow from backup goaltender to general manager in 2006, Charles B. Wang, the Islanders’ owner, conceded that the move was unorthodox but said that much of his business career had been based on doing things differently.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Charles B. Wang, the Islanders’ owner, wanted to try out sumo wrestlers as goaltenders, a former Islanders executive said.
Of course, what some call unorthodox strikes others as, well, eccentric or weird. Shifting Snow from the goal crease to the front office has not restored the franchise to glory. In the years since, the team has made one playoff appearance and has had five consecutive postseason-free losing seasons.
But then Wang was, from the start, a basketball fan and a hockey novice. Mike Milbury, a former general manager of the Islanders, recalled that Wang wanted to get rid of the team’s scouts (to rely on the league’s central scouting system) and try out sumo wrestlers as goaltenders.
“He assumed that nobody could put a goal past a sumo wrestler,” Milbury said in a telephone interview from Boston. But, Milbury added, Wang’s heart was in the right place. “He was a man of his word, a guy who desperately wanted to keep the team on the Island,” he said.
Wang was unable to secure a renovated or new arena in Uniondale. But the announcement on Wednesday that he has agreed to join the Nets in 2015 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn means that the franchise is still, geographically, on Long Island.
“Hello, Brooklyn!” he said at a news conference at Barclays, wearing a blue pinstriped suit and an Islanders tie.
Wang, who made his fortune in the computer software business, will remain the sole owner of the Islanders. He said he did not offer to sell a portion of the team to Bruce Ratner, the majority owner of the arena, and Ratner did not ask. The team will not become the Brooklyn Islanders, and Snow will remain the general manager.
Wang and his partner Sanjay Kumar were an odd couple, certainly in sports ownership, when they acquired the team in 2000. Wang was born in Shanghai, grew up in Flushing and attended Queens College. Kumar — who by 2007 would be in federal prison for securities fraud — immigrated from Sri Lanka. They were running Computer Associates International, a software maker that Wang had co-founded.
On the day they took control, Wang offered a vow typical of owners buying losing teams: to restore it to first-class status.
But, he said, “We are not medicine men promising a very quick cure.” He chided the Rangers for their high payroll, and with a gleeful smile, said, “Ooh, that’s mean to Chuck,” referring to Charles F. Dolan, the head of Cablevision, the Rangers’ owner.
Over time, though, Wang has more than matched Dolan in the volume of turnover in senior management.
Wang’s second general manager, Neil Smith, was fired after 40 days.
“His vision of how he wanted the organization to work internally, and mine, were total opposites and it couldn’t work,” said Smith, who built the Rangers team that won the 1994 Stanley Cup and is now a television analyst. “He owned the team, and he won.”
But owning the team has been a losing proposition. By 2003, Wang admitted that the Islanders had lost $52.2 million on his watch.
“The team has to be self-sustaining,” he said. “This is not a church that will stay open forever.”
The doors to the church stayed open, however. By 2009, he told Newsday that he would not have bought the team if knew how difficult it would be, with playing at the aging Nassau Coliseum and failing to get a new or renovated arena. By then, Newsday reported, he had spent $209 million to keep the team solvent. None of that should have made any sense to Wang, who has a mathematics degree. By then he had accumulated more in losses than what he and Kumar had paid for the team: $187.5 million.
Wang’s penchant for some peculiar long-term contracts might forever cling to him.
In 2001, he signed Alexei Yashin to a 10-year, $87.5 million contract. But Yashin was not the superstar Wang hoped for, and Wang paid him nearly $18 million to buy out the remaining four years of the deal.
Milbury said he wished he had balked at the deal, “but it was his money.” Soon after, Wang gave Michael Peca a five-year deal; Milbury said he managed to talk Wang out of giving Peca 10 years, too.
Five years later, Wang wielded his checkbook to give the goaltender Rick DiPietro what was, until then, the longest contract in National Hockey League history: $67.5 million over 15 years. At the time, Wang said that “this is not a big deal,” and that it was no different than some other major commitments in his business career.
“Now I’m doing it in sports and everybody is like: ‘Oh, my God. How could he do that?’ ”
People are still asking that; the often-injured DiPietro has not lived up to Wang’s hopes for him.
The same could be said for his team, which will be a lame duck at a substandard arena for three years. The future will be one in which his landlord, Ratner, is a friend who shares his passion for photography.
“I’m a tenant,” Wang said, but in the sort of arena that he aspired to build, without success.
