While Wang was as behind-the-scenes an owner as you will find in any major prosports franchise, Ledecky revealed that he is anxious to be out front in leading the Isles, taking advice from fans and letting them know how he feels about their sentiments regarding the team.
“I want to be out there and I want to hear what the fans have to say,” Ledecky said.“Being invisible for two years, your picture’s not in the newspaper or online. I’ve talked to hundreds of fans anonymously and not posing as the owner, just posing as a fan. Sometimes wearing a coat and tie, so a couple of times they thought that I was the usher and asked where the seats were.”
“What I love is the fans come to me with all these ideas and I try to run them down,” he noted. “But we are meeting consistently with Barclays and Long Island Rail Road. They ran extra trains for the playoffs. I said to the head of Long Island Rail Road, ‘How come you can’t do that during the regular season? They said,‘Maybe we can.’”
A shift in ownership and attitude, however, can’t take the focus off the product the Isles will put on the ice during Season Two at Barclays Center this coming winter.
The team lost coveted free-agent forwards Kyle Okposo, Frans Nielsen and Matt Martin while adding front-liners Andrew Ladd and Jason Chimera.
Snow, who went straight from back-up goalie to GM a decade ago, will likely be the first domino to fall if those moves don’t result in the Isles at least getting as far as they did last season, when they knocked off Florida in a thrilling first-round playoff series before being ousted by Tampa Bay in the conference semifinals.
But for now, Ledecky will stick with the status quo, as long as Snow and Capuanocontinue to make progress.
“Winning fixes a lot of things, but you still in a world where there’s a sports dollar that’s being competed for, you have to supply your stockholders, who are the fans, you’ve got to supply them with a world-class experience,” Ledecky said.
Isle Have Another: The Isles signed late-season sparkplug Alan Quine to a two-year deal Wednesday after the 23-year-old had two goals and four assists duringthe team’s playoff run last season. Quine, a 6-foot center from Belleville, Ontario, netted the game-winning overtime tally in Game 5 of New York’s first-round series against the Panthers. … On Tuesday, Snow inked defenseman Scott Mayfield, also 23, to a two-year pact. Mayfield scored his first career NHL goal during a six-game stint with the Isles last season, also amassing 11 penalty minutes.