Middle Seats and Misconducts

Long before NHL players flew exclusively on charter planes, the New York Islanders were duking it out in coach, flying commercial with the rest of us.

"It was a slugfest," said Brad Dalgarno, who played 321 games for the Islanders from 1986-96. "We were a big messy lot when we traveled."

With 23 players, plus trainers, coaching staff and management, someone inevitably had to sit in a middle seat. Seniority had its perks, as the middles were often reserved for rookies.

"I got caught one time with a middle seat and one of the rookies had the aisle seat," said Billy Smith. "I looked at him for three or four minutes Somebody behind him pushed his chair and he turns around he looks and I'm sitting in the middle. He said, 'would you like my seat?' I said, 'you bet I do.'"

While a middle seat was certainly unappealing for a legend like Smith, who is an aisle man, rookies often relished the opportunity to sit between two veterans. Before Bryan Trottier was Bryan Trottier he was a middle seater, the youngest guy on the team and last to get his boarding pass.

"It was wonderful whether you sat next to JP Parise, or Jude Drouin, or Andre St. Laurent there are lots of fun stories to share and you get to know the guys a little bit better," Trottier said. "Sitting between two guys was a lot of fun because you had two guys to talk to and two guys to listen to.

"I just enjoyed company and it was just great fun," Trottier added. "Ed Westfall did crossword puzzles and we'd do crossword puzzles together it was really kind of special."

Whether he knew it or not, Trottier had that same effect on a 19-year-old Kelly Hrudey, who joined the team for a preseason game in Chicago.

"To my left is Bryan Trottier and to my right is Mike Bossy, so they put me in a middle seat, and I'm surrounded by two incredible legends," Hrudey told the Talkin' Isles podcast. "Even at that point I knew what kind of players they were, what kind of careers they'd end up having, so it was phenomenal."

Rookies took on additional travel responsibilities, like coordinating luggage. At first Trottier took the job seriously, getting bags on and off luggage racks, tipping bell hops and sky caps to get it to the proper rooms. When Trottier wanted to stop being the luggage gopher, he started tanking to get relieved of his newfound responsibility.

"Eddie Westfall laughed about it, he goes, 'you know rookie you did a good job for about three road trips and after that you really screwed up," Trottier said. "I said, 'Thanks, I did it on purpose, so you guys would fire me."

The Islanders were short on entertainment, but long on airport time during the commercial travel days and often had to get creative to pass the time.

"We'd be at LaGuardia and we'd all just be slumped in a waiting area," Dalgarno said. "They would do the old drop a $5 bill with a piece of thread attached to it when people would get off the plane. By the end of it, there's like 100 people laughing at people trying to find and catch this $10 bill on the ground."

Pranks or no pranks, Smith was not a fan of how much time the Islanders spent in transit.

"I used to hate it," Smith said. "You come [to the rink] an hour before to get the bus, so there's an hour wasted. You get on the bus, it's an hour to the airport. You have to be there two hours before to get on the airplane, so you're already got four or five hours to burn before you even get on a plane.

Smith added: "Then you fly somewhere. You get in late; you eat crap. You get up the next day, you play the game and then you stay over, and it kills you. I see how lucky these guys are today with their charters. It's the best way to get the best out of your players."

NHL teams all have their own charters now, but in the beginning, there were some disparities.

"We used to always hear about how the Rangers would get to park in a private hangar and all their cars were started when they came off the plane," Dalgarno said. "We'd get off somewhere in the middle of Long Island scraping the ice off our windows with credit cards or plastic debit cards and struggling to get out of snowplowed parking lots. We always felt like we were the hard done by gang out on the Island even though we love playing together."

Planning travel can be a thankless job.

"I can't imagine the logistics of it quite frankly, finding that many seats on planes at different times," Dalgarno said.

The logistics get even tougher in the playoffs when a next game isn't always assured, and tickets may need to be bought in haste. Take 1993 for example. After the Islanders beat the Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 6 at Nassau Coliseum, the team had to scramble to book flights back to Pittsburgh for Game 7. As a result, the team flew out of two different airports.

"We flew out of two different airports,"

Glenn Healy told Talkin' Isles

. "We didn't fly charter back then. It was commercial. There was a flight that left from LaGuardia and one that left from MacArthur."

While commercial travel wasn't always easy for the frequent flying Islanders, the airport and airplane experiences offered bonding opportunities for the team and plenty of stories.

"It's fun traveling with the guys," Trottier said. "Lots of stories, snowstorms and sitting around airports and, you know, just a whole bunch of things."