Welcome to Star Wears, where our Short Shifts team will highlight each NHL team\u2019s unique and creative way to honor their player of the game after each victory, handing them a token of appreciation that usually lasts at least one season, and sometimes takes on a life of its own.<\/p>\n
Team: New York Islanders<\/p>\n
Item: Iron Man Helmet<\/p>\n
Origin Story: Iron Man started as a comic book in 1968, but the popularity of the character exploded with Robert Downey Jr.\u2019s portrayal of the hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting with the 2008 movie named for the title character and the series of \u201cAvengers\u201d movies to follow. The Islanders were just looking for something cool to give away to the star of the game. “We saw a clip of someone else having one of those things and thought it was cool,\u201d Islanders captain Anders Lee<\/a> told the team\u2019s website<\/a>. \u201cNothing more to it other than we thought it was awesome. Picked one up for ourselves\u2026 It’s a fun little thing to do after the game.”<\/p>\n City connection (dubious or otherwise): Tony Stark, the man inside the metal suit, was born on Long Island in the comics and later built Stark Tower, which became Avengers Tower, in New York City. In the Marvel movies, he mentors another young up-and-coming super hero you may have heard of, Spider Man, who hails from Queens, the only borough of New York City that borders Long Island, where the Islanders play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to Star Wears, where our Short Shifts team will highlight each NHL team\u2019s unique and creative way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-244345","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}