The big news in the sports world this past week (aside from Bill Belichick joining the head coaching ranks again) was Juan Soto’s contract. With the Major League Baseball (MLB) offseason in full swing, Soto signed a record-breaking deal with the New York Mets with a 15-year $765 million contract.
Related: What Went Wrong With Oliver Wahlstrom and the Islanders?
The Mets are owned by one of the wealthiest people in the world and one thing is clear, Steve Cohen is willing to win at all costs, literally. The Soto signing is a defining point in his tenure but since taking over the team in 2020, he’s spent big with the hopes of bringing a championship to the team he grew up rooting for. The title has yet to come but it’s hard to ignore the spending and how it’s made the Mets look different in their city and the baseball landscape.
For many New York Islanders fans, the wish is to have an owner like Cohen or have him buy the team to turn it into a juggernaut. The Islanders, like the Mets, are always seen as the secondary franchise in New York, but what if that could change? What if Cohen bought the NHL team? Would he make much of a difference? The short answer is yes, but there would be obstacles in the way that he’d have to overcome.
A Salary Cap Makes Team-Building Tougher
The Soto deal doesn’t happen in the NHL. On the contrary, a lucrative contract handed out to one player usually sets the rest of the team back. The NHL is a hard cap league where every team can only spend a small amount on their roster and because of that, every team must make tough decisions.
Cohen has gone crazy with the roster spending to acquire talent to improve the Mets. He was behind the Max Scherzer contract in the 2021 offseason and the Justin Verlander signing the subsequent offseason, two of the top pitchers in baseball who were given top dollar (interestingly, neither is on the team anymore). Cohen has the urge to add with big contracts and would want to do the same in the NHL but wouldn’t because of the cap.
It’s one of the reasons the NHL is one of the best leagues. There’s no specific way to build a championship-winning team. Teams can’t tank or draft their way to the top. They can’t spend their way to the top either. A lot must go right and great teams thrive in multiple team-building facets.
The salary cap would be frustrating for Cohen and prevent him from making a team like the Islanders a dominant one. Yes, he could lure a star or two but every time a top player entered free agency, he wouldn’t have the upper hand. That said, there is one way he would spend that would help the team on the ice.
Cohen’s Spending on a Front Office & Coaching Staff
There isn’t a salary cap for the front offices of the coaches. It’s one area where owners in theory can spend big but don’t. Most contract details for head coaches and general managers (GMs) aren’t released to the public but the few that have been were surprisingly low numbers. Great coaches aren’t paid like great players.
That would change if an owner like Cohen was running an NHL team. With the Mets, he wasn’t going to be denied David Sterns and after years of trying to pry the executive away from the Milwaukee Brewers, he finally signed him to run the baseball operations. While the manager of the team isn’t a big spend, it’s a smart one with the new front office, hired by Cohen, signing Carlos Mendoza in 2023. The Mets have a history of issues and failures that have resulted in disappointing season after disappointing season but they finally have the right people running the team.
The same would happen if Cohen owned the Islanders. If he wanted current GM Lou Lamoriello and head coach Patrick Roy out, he would have them gone. Moreover, if there were two people he wanted to run the team, he’d make sure it would eventually happen. Whether it’s waiting for Bill Zito or Kelly McCrimmon to be the GM or searching for the next great head coach, Cohen would make sure the Islanders would eventually have the right duo in place.
The Downsides of Cohen’s Decision-Making
The ability to spend big for coaches and executives is an advantage. Or at least it’s supposed to be. The problem is that recent history has shown the downsides, especially when the team struggles. This is an issue that starts at the ownership level and works its way down to the players.
The Mets have the right manager running the team with Mendoza on the field, but it took three attempts for Cohen to finally find the right person for the job. Likewise, the team had to endure the Billy Eppler tenure before bringing in Sterns to lead the front office. There was this belief in baseball that if Cohen didn’t like a GM or a manager, he would have them fired since, after all, that’s how he ran his business (The Athletic Baseball Show had a great conversation about how Cohen thinks and operates).
The problem is that many sports owners think that way. They want to run their teams the way they ran whatever enterprise gave them their wealth. It doesn’t translate to success on the field and worse, it often backfires and makes teams worse in the sports industry.
The 2023 MLB season was a mess for the Mets as they went 75-87 and had the fourth-worst record in the National League. Cohen ideally wanted to fire both Eppler and Buck Showalter, the manager at the time, in the middle of the season. If he did that, other people in the league would take note and it would have made the Mets an undesirable team to join.
Owners who make impulsive decisions and overreact to every win, loss, high, and low point ultimately become the worst in sports. The Dan Snyder-owned Washington Commanders (formerly the Redskins) were that team for two decades in the National Football League (NFL). The David Tepper-led Carolina Panthers are becoming that type of team with the owner replacing head coaches seemingly every season (Dave Cannales is their eighth since 2018, the year Tepper bought the team). The New York Knicks were one of those teams for a while until owner James Dolan finally took a step back and let the front office run the National Basketball Association (NBA) team (they’ve been one of the best in the league since he took a step back).
When Cohen bought the Mets, many thought he would become the next George Steinbrenner, the prominent owner of the New York Yankees and arguably the most famous owner in sports until he passed away in 2010. Cohen, like Steinbrenner, would put his money where his mouth is and there would be no fear to shake things up. It’s easy to forget how toxic and forgettable the Yankees became for a decade, one where the owner had a stranglehold on the team, and how oddly enough, they became a dynasty when he wasn’t involved in the baseball operations. In the early 1990s, the MLB suspended him and he wasn’t allowed to trade prospects that would end up becoming Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, and other young stars who would lead baseball’s most successful franchise to four World Series titles in a five-year span.
Where Cohen’s Ownership Would Make a Difference
In the NHL and sports in general, ownership is nothing until it’s everything. The hockey world saw this firsthand when the Arizona Coyotes were front and center as a team that was suddenly relocated to Utah and didn’t have an ownership group that was willing to keep the team in the desert.
Yes, the NHL has a salary cap but there are ways for owners to cut corners. Even when teams barely reach the cap floor, they find ways to spend the minimum elsewhere, from arena upgrades to team facilities and so on. Conversely, there are plenty of ways for owners to spend big and make their teams a destination, even a franchise with no winning history.
The New Orleans Saints were a laughingstock in the NFL for decades. When Sean Payton was hired as their head coach, he taught the ownership group how to spend to win. It meant upgrading the facilities, having the coaching staff stay in good quality hotels and not run down motels, improving travel and food for the team, and all the small details that create a winning culture.
In the NHL, there’s no budget for how teams can upgrade the team off the ice. There’s no doubt Cohen would make sure the Islanders would become a destination. He wouldn’t build a new arena with UBS Arena being a state-of-the-art recently built venue (he didn’t replace Citi Field, at least not yet) but all the other ways to spend big on an NHL team would be noticed. It wouldn’t stop at the NHL level, Cohen would work to improve the American Hockey League (AHL) setting as well.
Ultimately, the players on the ice determine whether a team will win the Stanley Cup or not. However, having a good owner willing to spend does move the needle. It makes a team better and slowly, a desirable place for players around the league to join. Cohen would provide that if he owned the Islanders.
