Zeitgeist: NHL.com to shut down after founders are hired by NHL

Yet another popular hockey website has gone offline as its founders have accepted a job within the National Hockey League.

The NHL has announced the hiring of the founders of NHL.com, the league’s flagship website, as hockey information directors effective immediately. NHL.com was rendered inactive following the announcement, leaving hockey fans to collect and compile their own news, scores, standings or team and player stats as well as tangentially hockey-related puns on their own from now on.

“We are proud and thrilled to bring the creators of such a valuable hockey site into our organization,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said. “We’re looking at adding a wide spectrum of proprietary tools for our internal, private use, and the NHL.com experts can provide those tools for us.”

The NHL launched NHL.com in 1996 and it had become a go-to site for both casual and hardcore hockey fans craving knowledge about their favorite teams. Visitors logging on now will only see a static good bye message:

In recent months, NHL teams have been snapping up the founders of prominent independently-run websites as front office consultants or analysts. War-on-Ice.com co-founder Sam Ventura was hired by the Pittsburgh Penguins last summer, before they won the Stanley Cup. Darryl Metcalf, who founded stats site Extraskater.com, was hired by the Toronto Maple Leafs the previous year. And most recently, Tom Poraszka, the founder of salary cap info site General Fanager, was named Hockey Operations Analyst for the league’s Las Vegas expansion team which begins play in 2017.

Less than a year ago, NHL.com underwent a complete overhaul by switching to cutting edge web hosting site, GeoCities.com. Representatives from GeoCities could not be reached for comment in either ICQ or a chat room.

It’s unclear what the NHL.com team will be working on within the league offices, but it’s safe to say that with 20 years of statistical information already at their fingertips, the NHL is looking for some degree of competitive edge over its peers. Bettman joked that he knows how much the hiring will disappoint fans of the site, but said that the overall goal is hiring the most knowledgeable people who can make the NHL better.

“Nobody knows these teams and players better than NHL.com,” he said. “We can use this information to really understand our own players, and we’ll get to keep all the good puns to ourselves for internal humor purposes only.”

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This is obviously totally fake. NHL.com is still up for your browsing pleasure or you can log on to any team site to see a site that looks just like it. And may the legendary General Fanager rest in peace.