I thought about masking my true IP address by bouncing through a relatives computer in another state (easy enough to do). It appears that "hidemyass" is just a commercialized (albeit, free) way to accomplish the same end result by using a proxy.

I did check with "NHL Game Center Live" support and they confirmed that you are able to watch all your local team games, but only AFTER a 48 hour blackout period has expired. You can rewind time and watch every game in its entirety once you've waited that two day penalty period. So if you don't mind a two day delay after a game has been played before you get to watch it, you don't need to go through the extra step of masking your true IP address. Still, waiting two days doesn't work very well when all the folks at your office are talking about the results of last nights game that you have not been able to watch yet.

But despite the potential hassles of trying to watch games by streaming, $49 per year for NHL Game Center Live is a heck of a lot cheaper than a monthly cable/satellite bill, especially since they tend to reserve the local sports channels to the higher priced programming packages. No such thing as a "Basic Cable With Local Sports" package. No siree, it has to be the expensive "America's Favorite 51,734 Channels Plus Local Sports" package before you can get the channels you actually want!