Isle be skating home!
Bye, Brooklyn! Team returning to its roots
The New York Islanders will be putting their failed Brooklyn hockey experiment on ice — with state officials approving a new arena at Belmont Park that will let the NHL team skate back to Long Island, sources told The Post.
Gov. Cuomo is expected to announce Wednesday that the Islanders have won the bidding to build an 18,000-seat arena next to the horse-racing track — where the team hopes to improve on its Barclays Center attendance numbers, which have fallen to the lowest in the NHL two years after their move to Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn from Uniondale, LI.
“This is great day for fans of the Islanders and Long Island,” said one government source. “Brooklyn never did work out.”
The Islanders-Belmont Park proposal — which beat out a bid by Major League Soccer’s New York City Football Club to construct a 26,000-seat open-air stadium on the site — will include a 435,000-square-foot retail hub, a 200-room hotel and other amenities. They’ll be built on under- used parking lots adjacent to the 112-year-old track just east of the Queens-Nassau County border in Elmont.
No timetable was immediately announced for completion of the project, although the Islanders are expected to remain at Barclay Center through next season, and then possibly return to their old home at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale until the new arena is ready.
Teaming up with the Islanders on the project will be Sterling Project Development, a real-estate firm headed by the Wilpon family, which owns the Mets, and the Oak View Group, whose investors include James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden Co.
The team’s fan base has been sour about the move from Long Island, where the team had played since joining the NHL in 1972. The Islanders have been averaging only 11,642 fans per game, 3,692 less than their final season at the Coliseum.
Then-owner Charles Wang took the team to Brooklyn after Nassau voters rejected a referendum that would have helped fund the building of a new Long Island arena.
Mikhail Prokhorov — the Rus- sian billionaire who owns the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, who also play at Barclays, and Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, which operates Barclays and Nassau Coliseum — reportedly wants the Islanders out of Barclays, believing that more concerts and other attractions would bring in more revenue.
His group and the Islanders have until Jan. 1 to reach a deal on terms of a new lease. If they don’t, either can break the lease.
Representatives for the Island- ers and NYCFC did not return messages seeking comment. Officials with Empire State Development Corp., which oversaw the bidding on the Belmont site, and Barclays Center declined to comment.
The Post first reported in February 2016 that the Islanders and Barclays Center were looking to opt out of their 25-year lease — less than a year into the deal.