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Why Are So Many New Jersey Hockey Fans Rangers Fans?

Why are so many New Jersey fans Rangers fans? The Devils' owner bet they'd switch in 1982. Hockey Maven Stan Fischler explains why they never did.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · October 28, 2026

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Seth Everett was eight on the day his family moved from Brooklyn to Marlboro, New Jersey. He says the Colorado Rockies moved to New Jersey that same day. His job was to keep his little sister away from the movers. The pay was Carvel.

He has been a Devils fan since the very first game. At his new school, though, a lot of kids weren't, and he couldn't work out why.

So why are so many New Jersey fans Rangers fans? Because the Rangers got there first. Families across the state were already rooting for them, and in 1982 the Devils showed up and asked those families to start over. Most said no, and they passed the habit to their kids. The Devils' owner had bet on the opposite.

Seth took the question to Stan Fischler on Sports With Friends, episode 552. Seth introduced him as 94, and Fischler rounded himself up to 95 halfway through. He has written about the Devils-Rangers rivalry for NHL.com. He also served as vice president of a Rangers fan club in the early 1950s, and he did Devils games for years. Asked who he roots for, he says all three New York-area teams. He's a good person to ask.

What happened when the Rockies moved to the Meadowlands?

The franchise started as the Kansas City Scouts in 1974, moved to Denver for the 1976–77 season, and was a mess there. In Seth's version of the story, a newspaper headline and a ballot came next. The real order of events is messier.

On May 27, 1982, the Rockies were sold to a group headed by Jersey City native John McMullen, who also owned baseball's Houston Astros. McMullen announced the team would play at Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford.

This had been tried before. A previous owner wanted the same move in 1978. Fischler's account is that the Rangers, Islanders and Flyers each voted to veto any move into the New York-New Jersey market. McMullen got around them the expensive way. He was willing to pay indemnity fees to all three teams.

The new team needed a name. A contest picked the New Jersey Devils, after the legendary Jersey Devil of the Pine Barrens. That was the contest Seth's mother helped him enter. Nobody has produced the ballot count, so whether his one vote mattered is, let's say, unconfirmed. His parents told him it did. He believed them for three seasons.

Did John McMullen really think Rangers fans would switch?

He did, mostly. On the podcast, Fischler says people in the business told McMullen that once a team was in New Jersey, all the Rangers fans living there would turn into Devils fans. McMullen, in Fischler's words, was "partly" convinced.

Later McMullen was blunt about how that went. He had figured every Rangers fan in New Jersey would switch, and he admitted, "I was sadly mistaken."

The numbers backed him up. Fischler wrote that on any given night the Rangers visited East Rutherford, at least half the crowd was rooting for the Blueshirts. The arena seated 19,040, but early Devils games averaged a little over 7,000, a figure helped along by sellouts when the Rangers came to town.

Look at it from the Rangers fan's side. The Rangers had been around since 1926. A family in Bergen County had been following them for decades. Fischler's phrase on the show is that generations of New Jerseyans "never would consider" the Devils "simply because they didn't exist." A new team doesn't undo that.

Is Rangers loyalty really "in the genes"?

“It's all biological. It's in the genes. And the genes are passed from one Ranger family onto the kids and so on and so on.”
— Seth Everett, on Sports With Friends

Fischler says a reporter once asked McMullen why so many Rangers fans stayed Rangers fans. McMullen answered that it was biological, in the genes, passed from one Rangers family to the kids. In Fischler's NHL.com version, the answer is shorter: "It's genetic."

It isn't, of course. Nobody has found the Rangers gene. What McMullen described is inheritance, and it works about like a last name. Nobody chooses it, and nobody trades it in because a new one showed up down the highway. He worked out the mechanism himself, too: Rangers fans, wherever they live, pass their rooting interest to their kids.

Fischler's example is Adam Fox. Fox grew up in Jericho, Long Island, and Fischler says his father and grandfather were lifelong Rangers fans. Fischler says he interviewed the grandfather a month or two before the recording. The grandfather is 100.

Fox's career followed the family line. He didn't sign with the Flames, who drafted him 66th overall in 2016. He then refused to sign with Carolina. On April 30, 2019, Carolina traded his rights to the Rangers for two second-round picks. Nobody has a signed statement saying he would only play for the Rangers. But former Rangers GM Jeff Gorton all but confirmed that speculation. His father kept Rangers season tickets for years while living deep in Islanders territory. Geography lost to the family again.

How did the Devils build a fan base from scratch?

Fischler knows fan clubs. He says the Rangers' PR man, Herb Goran, formed the Rangers fan club by 1950. Fischler was its vice president in 1952 and 1953. In September 1954 Goran called and offered him a job. That was Fischler's first paid hockey work, and he says he couldn't sleep the night before.

Fischler says teams eventually absorbed most fan clubs. The Devils club, he says, stayed independent and strong. He credits his former intern Matthew Blittner with a detailed story on how it kept its identity, though Fischler is the only source I'm relying on for that.

The Devils also had a first radio voice who worked at it. Larry Hirsch had a call-in show between periods called "Dial the Devils." He took fans' names and handed the list to the ticket department to hustle new customers. He also hung out with fans after games until he ran out of people to talk to. A fan named Larry Berger said Hirsch recruited new Devils fans, including some who had been aligned with the Rangers, Islanders and Flyers.

Hirsch had a complication. McMullen told him that if he mentioned the Rangers, he was fired. Hirsch grew up on Rangers hockey. Once, going to a break, he got as far as "you're listening to New York..." before he caught himself.

The genes theory leaves out one thing. Writer Tim Sullivan found "some converts, clearly," because the Devils offered a more affordable way to see the sport they loved. Rangers loyalty is sticky. It isn't airtight.

When did New Jersey start taking the Devils seriously?

Slowly. It took six years in New Jersey before the team had any credibility as a playoff squad. McMullen hired Lou Lamoriello in April 1987. Then came the last night of the 1987-88 season. John MacLean's overtime goal in Chicago got the Devils into the playoffs for the first time, and the Rangers were out. The Devils had finally beaten the Rangers at something that mattered.

The bigger moment was 1994. Their playoff series went to a seventh game at Madison Square Garden and double overtime, and Stephane Matteau scored past Martin Brodeur. The Rangers went on to win the Cup. The Devils took the next one. They won it in 1995, 2000 and 2003.

That is how a new inheritance starts. Kids who grew up in the 1990s with a Devils team that won got to hand that team down. Seth's two daughters are hockey fans, and the family watches every Devils-Rangers game together.

If you want Stan's version, including the fan club story and the 100-year-old grandfather, it's all in episode 552 of Sports With Friends.

Seth tells one more story on the show. He's distantly related to Adam Fox, through a funeral, an unveiling and an Uncle Harold. So when Fox hits Devils captain Nico Hischier into the boards, the Everett house yells that he isn't invited to Thanksgiving anymore. Fox is a Rangers fan, a Rangers star and, technically, family.