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.

Tags: fantasy hockey, fantasy sports, fantasy sports business, fantasy sports industry, hockey, nhl, nhl.com, yahoo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Lead Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.