I got a copy of the book for Christmas and just finished reading it today. Of the book itself I'll say the writing style is definitely couched firmly in the sort of "technical writing" that a thesis would be written in, so it's no surprise that the book's genesis was Hirshon's doctoral thesis. I like it. It's prose with many period accounts and retrospective anecdotes sprinkled in, but with each of those anecdotes meticulously referenced in about 40 pages of numbered endnotes. It's like a postmortem report with enough pizzazz to keep it from being interminably dry.
Hirshon's overall conclusion is about the same as what I'd said in my post in
"What was the worst jersey in modern NHL history?": it wasn't so much that the jersey designs themselves were objectively 'bad', it's that they were introduced at a time that coincided with the worst era in the Islanders' history. There was just so much bad stuff going on behind the scenes, and the results on the ice so putrid, that the fisherman logo became inextricably linked with managerial ineptness and on-ice futility.
What was most interesting to me about the story was the background work that went into it. The Islanders management headed by "The Gang of Four" minority owners—Paul Greenwood, Ralph Palleschi, Bob Rosenthal and Stephen Walsh—were enticed by the runaway merchandising success that the Sharks, Ducks and Panthers experienced and wanted to cash in. The Islanders were among the league's worst in merchandise sales, and saw that the new teams that were only a few years old were making a ****-ton more money than them, so at the ownership group's behest and at the suggesting of the NHL they hired SME Branding to do the redesign. (And let us not forget that the Isles weren't the only ones; in the abbreviated '94-'95 season the Flames and Blues introduced new unis, and the following season—remember, only about eight months later—the Bruins and Capitals did too, with the Ducks, Bruins, Kings, Penguins and Canucks introducing the first "third jerseys" on top of that. Lots of teams were trying to capitalize on this.)
The seed of the fisherman idea was to create a more kid-friendly branding with an easily identifiable mascot, rather than the nebulous idea of what an "Islander" was supposed to be. As the
New York Post article says, the fisherman caricature was inspired directly by the Billy Joel song "The Downeaster 'Alexa'":
I was a bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me
So the fisherman was really supposed to be invoking a reminiscence for the 'baymen' working off the eastern coasts of Long Island. SME made many designs though, and it's not clear in the book who really pushed for the fisherman. The SME guys said it was the Islanders management who pushed the fisherman idea (while SME's preferred option was a lighthouse), and the Islanders management said it was what SME presented to them so they went along with it. It seemed nobody wanted to be seen as having been on the hook for making the decision to go with it. Either way the story goes that SME hadn't done any focus groups or other research they would normally do
at the Islanders' behest, because the team itself was going to or already had. In the end nobody did, and it wasn't until after the logo was chosen and leaked to the press that the media poked fun at the similarities to the Gorton's mascot.
In the end ironically Islanders merch sales actually improved.
The very end of the book includes a transcript of an interview Hirshon did with former SME designer Pat McDarby, who passed away before the book was published. I thought it was amusing that he expressed some disdain for the original Islanders logo, calling it amateurish and noting the objective design problems it had. I don't know that I could say he's wrong. He did say that at a certain point it doesn't matter if there's a particular affinity for it, and that we're seeing a resurgence of 'retro' uniforms that are objectively 'worse' because of that affinity.