When I turned on ESPNews at 7:30 p.m. (settling in to write the Week 4 Start/Bench report for SportsBuff.com), I was met with the smiling mug of Paul Charchian — Minnesota radio personality, founder of Fanball, creator of LeagueSafe and general fantasy pillar.

The host referred to the trio of guests — which also included sports talk radio hosts Orlando Alzugaray of Miami and Carl Dukes of Houston — as the “Wednesday night crew,” so I can only assume Charchian is a weekly visitor.

As for the content, he had a very good line about Matt Millen’s firing being a big loss for the Vikings, saying that Millen’s presence in Detroit guaranteed two victories for his hometown club each season. (Indeed, Minnesota went 12-2 against Detroit during Millen’s tenure.)

Unfortunately, Charchian then lost me when he called Ozzie Guillen a “great manager.” Sorry, the guy’s highly entertaining (when managing someone else’s team) and did manage a team that won a World Series, but Guillen is also a big proponent of nonsense baseball virtues such as “smallball” and “scrappy gamers.” He probably still thinks Darin Erstad would be a valuable member of any team.

Of course, Charch never talked fantasy, but I guess he can only address the topics that are put to him.

Along with the approaching NHL season comes an overhaul of the league’s official website.

At the core of the updated site is a feature called “NHL Gamecenter,” which will provide video highlights, real-time stats and audio and social-networking capabilities. Gamecenter is free and designed to accompany game telecasts on television.

The league is also riding the wave of streaming live video online. “Gamecenter Live” will offer paid subscribers the chance to watch as many as four games at once and toggle between them to enlarge whichever one might be of particular interest.

It’s obvious — especially because the NHL says so in its press releases — that the fantasy crowd is a key focus of the changes. As part of that, the league has partnered with Yahoo! to offer a “co-branded fantasy game that is available through NHL.com. Clicking the registration button takes the user to Yahoo’s fantasy hosting site, so the feature seems to mostly be an extra portal by which fans can access the Yahoo game.

One positive that could come from the integration, though, between the league and the Yahoo platform. I don’t know if this is an issue that tends to pop up in hockey leagues, but I have certainly seen stats differ quite regularly between NFL.com and various fantasy football providers. They’re usually small things such as a few passing yards here and some extra tackles for individual defensive players there, but enhanced accuracy certainly won’t hurt anyone.