Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Rangers, is known as “the world’s most famous arena”. It’s also on top of New York’s Penn Station, which can be called “the world’s most famous train station.”
Yes, right under the Garden ice lay the tracks of the MTA, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad. That makes getting to and from New York Rangers games very convenient (you literally do not have to go outside, just upstairs), but did it cause a unique problem in the Rangers game one loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins?
Game one didn’t end until the third overtime. By the time Evgeni Malkin scored at the 5:58 mark, it was long after Cinderella’s coach had turned back into a pumpkin well after midnight. If you have ever been to New York, you know parking isn’t easy to come by. If you do happen to find parking, it will cost you quite a pretty penny. Point is, many of the blue shirts fans in attendance probably made use of that convenient train station downstairs.
Game one for the New York Rangers and Pittsburgh Penguins ended after midnight. That wasn’t optimal for fans needing a ride home.
Anyone who has taken public transit also knows that they operate on their own schedule, not yours. They especially don’t operate on the schedule of NHL playoff hockey. Most fans stayed to watch both teams epic (and for Igor Shesterkin, exhausting) performance. Meanwhile there might have been some fans that had to leave early to catch their ride home. Some even had to head overseas, you know, to New Jersey.
Most of you reading this are probably thinking “if I’m at a playoff game I’m staying until the very end no matter how late it goes!” That’s especially true if you paid expensive Madison Square Garden prices (the cheapest price on Stubhub for game two is $109 as of now). If public transit is your only ride home, those multiple overtimes might be too close of a call. Are you going to stay and watch the game even if it means being stranded in Manhattan until around 4:00 am?
This isn’t a uniquely New York problem, even if it seems more prevalent in the city that never sleeps (but apparently their trains to New Jersey do). More fans than ever are taking public transit to games. It was even a major selling point for the Seattle Kraken’s new stadium Climate Pledge Arena. Fans even got a free ride on mass transit with a game ticket. Easy rail service was also supposed to be a major convenience for New York Islanders’ fans heading to the new UBS Arena. Even if playoff hockey is the rare occurrence an NHL game drags on into the late night hours, and maybe only a few times of year at that, an increasing number of fans might be left with the decision of whether to stay or go home.
If last night’s game was anywhere but New York City, we might not even be wondering about this. All you fans lucky enough to drive to you stadium and leave on your own time avoid this problem completely. As the NHL, and various cities, push toward the sustainability mass transit brings, it might be a future problem for more than a few hockey fans.