HOME STRETCH
Isles’ new arena nears completion, with first puck drop set for late next month
The Islanders will play their first 13 games on the road to open the season, providing an extra few weeks for the final cosmetic touches to be completed before the long-awaited UBS Arena opens at Belmont Park.
The franchise’s first home game isn’t slated to be played until Nov. 20 against the Flames, one night after a charity concert will be held to christen the team’s $1.1 billion new home.
“The arena is going to open on time,” Islanders coowner Jon Ledecky said Thursday before he accompanied members of the media on a tour of the 17,500seat arena.
Earlier, Ledecky moderated a panel discussion alongside Islanders coowner Scott Malkin, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, Oak View Group CEO Tim Leiweke and former Mets COO Jeff Wilpon of arena partner Sterling Equities, praising all for their roles in helping push the arena project so close to the finish line.
“In the end, any team is only about the fans. Owners are just stewards of the community trust. … This arena is for every fan,” Malkin said. “It’s a shared experience. The Islanders are a community team.”
Malkin and Wilpon were not made available for questions from the media afterward. Fifty days out from the opener, Leiweke said construction crews “are working overtime and weekends” to make sure the final details are completed on the expansive concourses. He estimated 90 percent of the seating capacity has been installed and that the ice will be painted with the team’s logo by midOctober.
Leiweke also teased that the Sunday night after Thanksgiving (Nov. 28) “we’re going to have the hottest artist in the world and he’s going to finish his North American tour in this building.”
Still, the Islanders, who have made the Stanley Cup semifinals each of the past two seasons under Hall of Fame executive Lou Lamoriello and Cup-winning coach Barry Trotz, will be the building’s primary tenants.
From John Pickett to the fraudulent John Spano to Howard Milstein to Charles Wang, a string of previous ownership groups had sought, but failed, to get a commitment for a new arena to replace dilapidated Nassau Coliseum.
After a few seasons sharing Barclays Center in Brooklyn with the Nets before a return to the Coliseum in recent seasons, Ledecky and Malkin —who bought controlling interest of the team from Wang in 2016 — were the ones to get it done.
“It’s a tough question to answer why them as opposed to before, but clearly Scott Malkin had the vision, the commitment, the resources to get this done and he assembled the right team,” Bettman said. “They were relentless and they did everything they had to do to get it to this point.
“This building is state of the art and, frankly, no expense has been spared. People are going to like being there. … As everyone knows, there have been a lot of twists and turns the last three decades in the Islanders’ history. But I think this ship is on very stable seas.”
Bettman said once the next phase of construction is completed surrounding the arena — to be known as Belmont Village, replete with a 5,500-space parking garage, restaurants and retail space — the NHL will consider holding an All-Star Game and an NHL draft at UBS Arena in the near future.
“It is going to be one of the best buildings in the world,” Bettman said. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Scott and I want the entire area developed and done so that we can show it all off in its full grandeur. It’ll be very shortly after the entire project is completed.”
Ledecky said the designers tried to replicate the frenetic atmosphere at the Coliseum by making the roof similar in height — 93 feet, or 3 feet higher than its predecessor in Uniondale.
Leiweke added that completing the construction during the 18-month pandemic was “the challenge of a lifetime” and he acknowledged there were ‘some dark days” when they had to shut down construction.
Other notable features, especially for fans who regularly attended games at the Coliseum, include “more restrooms per person than any arena built east of the Mississippi [River],” according to Leiweke.
He also boasted that, for environmental reasons, “the building will be carbon-neutral within a few years after we open.”