The New York Islanders want your opinion.
Earlier this summer, the team opened a jersey design contest to allow a fan to come up with their third jersey for the 2027-28 season.
No Adobe Illustrator skills were necessary — an online portal with a set number of logos, striping, colors and fonts made it easy for graphic design experts and kindergarten students alike.
There was no shortage of submissions: more than 80,000 designs came in, according to the team. Islanders staff narrowed the selection down to eight jerseys, putting them out to a series of fan votes with a bracket-style elimination process.
The third and final round of voting opened Tuesday, pitting a navy blue lighthouse jersey against an “Islanders” word mark to decide the winner.
As creative as the process was, many people aren’t happy.
Fans have littered the comments of the Islanders’ posts with screenshots of jerseys they would have preferred to see over the given options. Some are kinder than others, as is often the case on social media, but most seem to share the same opinion: The given options aren’t bold enough.
I mean no disrespect to those who designed these sweaters (some of which I like), but I really feel like we need something truly different for our third jersey.
— Colin Moriarty (@longislandviper) August 12, 2026
There are so many amazing ideas that truly celebrate Long Island, our history, and our iconography. We can do better!
This whole thing went from extremely exciting to extremely disappointed extremely fast.
— Adam Rodkin (@ARodkin613) August 12, 2026
DO THE RIGHT THING #NegateTheEightpic.twitter.com/cAlkE1dFZM
— President of Long Island (@20longisland) August 12, 2026
Is it a good idea to let fans make decisions for pro sports teams?
A group of Ph.D. students at Columbia University, which included Simona Botti, a top researcher in the psychology of decision making, conducted a study that’s relevant to the Islanders’ situation.
Botti and her peers concocted four objectively awful mixtures of yogurt and spices: sage, tarragon, chili powder and celery seeds. They gave one group of participants their choice of which yogurt to try, while randomly assigning a flavor to each member of the other group.
Which group was more satisfied with the yogurt it tried? The one that had no choice at all.
In another study, Botti’s team interviewed two groups of parents whose newborn babies had been treated for life-threatening illnesses immediately after birth. Differences in the medical systems of two countries allowed the psychologists to observe both sides of the decision spectrum.
One group featured American parents, who had the choice to continue treatment on the babies or interrupt it. The other group consisted of French parents, whose decisions had been made for them by the doctors.
“What we found is that the American parents who chose suffered much more than the French parents,” Botti said in a 2013 TedX Talk about her research. “They had much more problems in coping with the death of the babies (and) overall experienced much more overall negative emotions and much more difficulties in life.”
One of the key takeaways from her research, she said, is this: “Choice freedom does not always improve subjective wellbeing.”
These are not catch-all studies. Others have found that choice and satisfaction go hand-in-hand in some instances. But Botti’s findings seem to be consistent with the Islanders’ jersey contest.
Usually, when a team releases a new jersey, the bulk of the fan base is excited. Even if they don’t particularly love the design, people often are satisfied with the fact that they can watch their team with less monotony and that their jersey collections can expand.
However, with tens of thousands of examples of what could have been, Islanders fans are focused on what they didn’t get, more so than what they will get.
Does it matter in the long run?
Fans will recall the most recent decision made via fan polls in the NHL: When Smith Entertainment Group asked the public for help in determining the name of Utah’s new team.
After four rounds of voting and approximately 850,000 responses, the group landed on the “Utah Mammoth” name, logo and branding.
While the eventual name reflected the wishes of many fans, some experienced the same disappointment that lots of Islanders fans are feeling now. It still comes up in the occasional conversation that the Mammoth “should have been the ‘Yeti’” or that “‘Outlaws’ would have been cooler.”
While that process was unique, the Mammoth are far from the only team that decided its name through some form of a fan vote, as the Deseret News wrote about in detail in 2025.
In most cases, at least in the NHL, the regret that comes from not getting your way seems to subside with time. It’s seldom suggested anymore that the Washington Capitals should have been called the “Pandas” or that the Tampa Bay Lightning would be better suited as the “Oceanics.”
