But, he said, “we are not medicine men promising a very quick cure.” He chided the Rangers for their high payroll and, with a gleeful smile, said, “Ooh, that’s mean to Chuck,” referring to Charles F. Dolan, the head of Cablevision, the Rangers’ owner.

Over time, though, Wang has more than matched Dolan in the volume of turnover in senior management.

Wang’s second general manager, Neil Smith, was fired after 40 days.

“His vision of how he wanted the organization to work internally — and mine — were total opposites, and it couldn’t work,” said Smith, who built the Rangers team that won the 1994 Stanley Cup and is now a television analyst. “He owned the team, and he won.”

But owning the team has been a losing proposition. By 2003, Wang said that the Islanders had lost $52.2 million on his watch.

“The team has to be self-sustaining,” he said. “This is not a church that will stay open forever.”

The doors to the church stayed open, however. By 2009, he told Newsday that he would not have bought the team if knew how difficult it would be, with playing at the aging Nassau Coliseum and failing to get a new or renovated arena. By then, Newsday reported, he had spent $209 million to keep the team solvent. None of that should have made any sense to Wang, who has a mathematics degree. By then he had accumulated more in losses than what he and Kumar had paid for the team: $187.5 million.

Wang’s penchant for some peculiar long-term contracts might forever cling to him.

In 2001, he signed Alexei Yashin to a 10-year, $87.5 million contract. But Yashin was not the superstar Wang hoped for, and Wang paid him nearly $18 million to buy out the remaining four years of the deal.