NHL.com underwent its annual redesign over the summer, and when it made its debut just before the start of the regular season it looked impressive. More visual than text driven, or so some reviews would have you believe. But judging by the first few nights of the season, I’m quite certain that a few stirring words would help what appears to be a static visual presentation. The score ribbon on the home page rarely reflected what was going on. At least 30 minutes after the first games were completed on Friday night, the score ribbon would have led visitors to NHL.com to believe that the games were in the second period, if not early in the third. It gets worse when you get to the scores page. Last season, a visitor had the option of 30- or 60-second automatic-refresh updates, or none at all. Now, you get nothing and like it unless you hit the refresh button. And good luck getting an accurate update even then. I scrapped my use of NHL.com on one computer, while keeping it on my laptop. On the big G5 Mac, I tested the scoreboard pages of ESPN.com and Yahoo!Sports NHL, both of which were far superior to that of NHL.com. OK, so if you are keeping score, that’s two strikes. And if you ask why I am using baseball terminology for a hockey Web site, it’s because the periods seemed to stand still on the league’s Web scoreboard, seemingly a full period the same game I was watching on television. (UPDATE: as of 6:32 pm EDT on Saturday, the box for the Capitals/Thrashers game still isn’t complete. Try to find the time of the Donald Brashear/Zach Bogosian penalties in the third period. Not there on NHL.com.) Eventually, even the real-time scoreboards started to stall.http://slapshot.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/the-bunker-nhlcom-looks-nice-but/?scp=1&sq=NHL.com&st=cse
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