John Tavares carries an annual cap hit of $5.5 M, and this year, he’ll see six million come in as his base yearly salary with the New York Islanders. He’s one of four players on the team, actually, who will cost at least $5M or more against the team’s cap space in the 2015-2016 season — but according to Peter Botte of the NY Daily News, he and his teammates are going to commute to work like regular New Yorkers.

That means they’ll take the LIRR.

The Long Island Railroad is the primary form of public transit for Long Island commuters who work in Manhattan and the other boroughs of the city, so it makes sense that the club is considering it as a viable form of transit to get to the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn. Tavares suggests that the team will sit ‘not in private cars, but w/other commuters, “like real Long Islanders”‘.

Of course, that’s the optimistic statement made by someone who has never actually had to take the LIRR to get to work on time; for dozens of island-dwellers in Nassau and Suffolk counties, there are entire novels worth of stories to share about the adventures of taking the train to work. After all — if the LIRR hasn’t made you three hours late to work because it stopped running to your station/got caught in train traffic/decided to stop working, are you really a New Yorker?

All joking aside, though, that’s extremely cool of the Islanders to suggest the players use the public transit available to get to their new arena. Hopefully, the fans will follow suit, and the traffic and parking in Brooklyn won’t ever become an issue worth talking about — if the Islanders are really committed to this move into the greater NYC area, they might as well jump in with both feet. Even though, you know, Tavares can probably afford a more expensive form of transportation than the LIRR.