{"id":26079,"date":"2026-03-05T17:28:31","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T17:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/26079\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T17:28:31","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T17:28:31","slug":"matthew-schaefers-hot-season-sparks-n-y-islanders-surge-attendance-boom-at-ubs-arena","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/26079\/","title":{"rendered":"Matthew Schaefer\u2019s hot season sparks N.Y. Islanders\u2019 surge, attendance boom at UBS Arena"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">The presence of Islanders rookie D Matthew Schaefer this season has \u201cinjected new life and exuberance, revitalizing a franchise that had been mired in mediocrity,\u201d according to Joe Pantorno of AMNY.com. The Islanders are currently 7th in the Eastern Conference, while Schaefer became the first 18-year-old defenseman to score 20 goals in a single season. Schaefer\u2019s and the Islanders\u2019 emergence is \u201cfinally getting more butts in the seats at UBS Arena, too.\u201d Sunday\u2019s win, which was the team\u2019s eighth in their last 10 games, featured a 12th-straight sellout at a \u201cstate-of-the-art venue that has been languishing near the bottom of the NHL\u2019s attendance figures for much of the last three years.\u201d Islanders President of Business Operations Kelly Cheeseman said, \u201cWe\u2019re going to sell out the last 12 [games of the regular season]. That wasn\u2019t the case when we started the year.\u201d He added, \u201cReally, around Thanksgiving is when we saw the tide turning, which is not irregular in the NHL. But I don\u2019t think the team saw that last year or the prior year. All the excitement &#8230; a lot of it is because of what the kid is doing\u201d (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amny.com\/sports\/islanders-matthew-schaefer-feat-3-2-26\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.amny.com\/sports\/islanders-matthew-schaefer-feat-3-2-26\/\">AMNY.com, 3\/2<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-franchises \">FULL PACKAGE: TNT\u2019s Paul Bissonnette said of Schaefer, \u201cOur expectations were high. But the fact that he\u2019s doing what he\u2019s doing on the ice, and he has like the character and the attitude and the media sense and all of that &#8212; he\u2019s a full package. And he\u2019s a complete organizational game changer.\u201d Former NHLer Keith Yandle said, \u201cYou want to say the sky\u2019s the limit for this guy, and it really is. But how much better can he get?\u201d (\u201cSpittin\u2019 Chiclets,\u201d Netflix, 3\/3).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The presence of Islanders rookie D Matthew Schaefer this season has \u201cinjected new life and exuberance, revitalizing a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[2651,1789,223],"class_list":{"0":"post-26079","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ubs","8":"tag-hockey","9":"tag-nhl","10":"tag-ubs"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116177751453831999","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}