Last night I was watching the Boston Bruins vs. New York Islanders NHL playoff game. Midway through the third period, I realized something. Neither the Boston Bruins nor the New York Islanders own their team name .com domain name. Bruins.com is owned by GoDaddy (via its NameFind portfolio company) and Islanders.com is owned by CCIN (Michael Castello and David Castello).
It looks like all NHL teams utilize the NHL.com domain name for their websites. However, each team owns its own domain name that forwards to their NHL-based website. For instance, the Boston Bruins website can be found by navigating to BostonBruins.com and the NY Islanders website can be found by navigating to NewYorkIslanders.com.
Several years ago, I took a look at the domain names used by professional sports teams in the four major sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL). At that time, NHL teams owned the fewest number of team .com domain names at just 25.8%. I thought I would take another look at NHL team domain names to see if anything has changed with respect to team name .com domain names. Here’s what I found: