The National Hockey League has agreed to provide videos of full-length games to Google Video. The current season's games as well as a selection of old games will be available at: http://video.google.com/nhl.html. The deal includes current season games as well as a selection of prior seasons' games.

The one catch? You can't see games until 48 hours after they air on television. Seems to be an unnecessary amount of time to wait to watch the game you missed, but I don't think the guys behind this deal see this as a substitute for watching TV. I think traditional content owners are desperately looking at ways to leverage their content online i.e. new ways to make money.

An interesting spin on this could be a future social media opportunity for the NHL. With all this content online you are facilitating consumer generated media through mashups and online conversation. It would be interesting to see if the NHL spawn a social networking site (of sorts) around this content - could be a great idea for sports leagues to look into.