When we reported on the index at the beginning of the season, Pittsburgh and Detroit (last year’s Cup finalists) were leading their respective conferences in total eBay sales. A few months into the season, however, both have been overtaken: in the East, Boston has jumped out to number one, while in the West, Chicago is dominating ($320K to second-place Detroit’s $176K).

So what’s triggered the movement? Well, in Chicago’s case, you’ve got a first-place team in a first-rate hockey market, with a host of young superstars… That’s a pretty good recipe for eBay success.

Boston, meanwhile, hasn’t had the same kind of hot start on the ice, but hosting the 2010 Winter Classic was great for merchandise sales. The game’s other participant, the Philadelphia Flyers, have also seen a big jump in total sales — all the way up to fourth in the NHL!

Pittsburgh continues to sell well (if only every franchise had a Sidney Crosby!), and the Sabres have been surprisingly profitable as well. Poor on-ice performances from a pair of Original 6 teams, the Maple Leafs and Canadiens, have led to disappointing merchandise sales, and subsequent drops in the Terapeak NHL Index standings.

With the league set to break for a few weeks when next month’s Winter Olympics begin, it’ll be interesting to see how the Games affect NHL sales. For many of the league’s superstars, the Olympics in Vancouver will be the biggest stage they’ve ever played on. And where legends are born… jerseys are bought!

Tonight, the puck drops on the 2009-10 NHL season!

As many of you know, Terapeak is a Canadian company, so it’s no surprise that many of us in the office are pretty pumped for the season ahead. Our local boys, the Canucks, look primed for a big year, and a long, eventful offseason have made us eager for the games to begin.

This season also marks the second for Terapeak’s NHL on eBay index, which tracks the total sales, total listings and average price of all 30 NHL squads, and allows users to view by division and conference. It also comes with this companion widget, which you can easily embed into your website or blog:

As for who’s looking primed for a breakout eBay selling season, the defending champion Penguins are high atop the league’s total sales rankings, while Cup runners-up Detroit sit in first place in the West. The remaining five “Original 6″ teams, plus Washington, make up the next-best-selling squads.

We’ll be sure to check in with updates as the season progresses, but for now, good luck to you and your team!

This morning, a quick look at the index (its companion widget can be seen below) shows some pretty interesting stats: namely, that the Total Sold Listings leaders in the Eastern and Western Conferences are, respectively, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

Of course we’ve been championing both clubs as top-sellers all season, but it’s funny to see after eight gruelling months and 100+ games played for each side, that the hottest eBay seller in each conference is represented in the Cup Finals as well. (An obvious contributing factor is the success and talent on both squads, plus the fact that both are still playing hockey well into June…)

As for how the rest of the finals will play out, here at Terapeak we’d like to see a good, long series… Because then that’s it for hockey until — gasp — October!

For hockey fans worldwide, it’s been a common refrain since the dynamic pair burst onto the scene four years ago, rivals from the get-go as they battled for Rookie of the Year honors, then traded MVP awards the following two seasons.

Tonight, less than two hours away, the first puck will drop in what NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has waited his whole life for — a do-or-die Game 7 showdown between Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins and Alex Ovechkin’s Washington Capitals. As a series thus far, it’s been nothing short of spectacular — from Washington’s initial 2-0 series lead and the emergence of rookie keeper Simeon Varlamov, to Pittsburgh’s three straight wins and the resurrection of Evgeni Malkin.

But not once has the battle between Crosby, 21, and Ovechkin, 23, been overshadowed.

So, in honor of what many have already labeled the game of the year, let’s take a look at the off-ice eBay competition between the two young forwards, beginning with a 30-day eBay.com search of “Sidney Crosby“:

Now, compare that to a similar search for “Ovechkin“:

Is it not a bit remarkable how close that competition is, even away from ice?

Finally, for kicks, let’s take a look at a 30-day “Evgeni Malkin” search (for those who don’t know, Malkin, 22, rather quietly outscored both Crosby and Ovechkin this season, and may well take home his own MVP trophy at the awards gala in July — needless to say, this has been lost in the hype!):

Enjoy the game, hockey fans!

Here at Terapeak, we’re literally counting down the hours until the first pucks drop over on the east coast (though many of us wouldn’t mind fast-forwarding right to tonight’s game in Vancouver!), but we’ll bide our time by taking a pre-playoffs look back at the Terapeak NHL Index, which we first launched last October (its companion widget seen below):

So how have the past month’s eBay sales reflected the NHL’s regular season? You can begin by looking at the top teams in both the Eastern and Western Conferences — Boston and San Jose, respectively. On one hand, you’ve got Boston, a storied franchise (albeit one that’s spent the past decade mired in mediocrity) that began the season if not among the top 5-selling teams, then at least comfortably in the top 10. And what has a great regular season done for them? Well, for one, it’s vaulted them to #2 among NHL team total eBay sales! (Behind, naturally, the Penguins, whose phenom centreman Sidney Crosby is legitimately as good — or better — a brand by himself as any team in the NHL.)

Out West, meanwhile, the San Jose Sharks are a still-relatively-young franchise that, despite consistently icing one of the best teams in the league (and inevitably choking that away come playoff-time), began the season once again on no one’s radar in terms of eBay sales. Perhaps chalk that up to playing home games in California, or perhaps it’s got more to do with their polarizing teal sweaters — whatever the case, all seems forgiven after the Sharks led the league in points and climbed to 3rd in Total Sales in the Western Conference (behind two always-popular Original 6 teams, Chicago and Detroit).

On the whole, regular season prowess has actually been a pretty solid indicator of sales this season: in the East, 7 of the 8 playoff teams find themselves among the conference’s 8 best-selling franchises, with only Carolina lagging behind the fray. In the West, meanwhile, sales are more-or-less aligned with regular season point totals… Only why are our Canucks among the conference losers in terms of Total Sales? Big city, great hockey market… What gives?

Ah, we’ll take a victory over the Blues and be happy with that! Enjoy the playoffs, everyone!

At the beginning of October, we reported that the top-three-selling NHL teams on eBay were Detroit, Pittsburgh and Montreal, followed by Buffalo and then the rest of the league’s “Original 6″ teams (Chicago, Toronto, NY Rangers, Boston). So what’s changed since then? Well, not a whole lot. Have a look at our NHL index here, or its companion widget below:

Perhaps the two most noticeable declines are Montreal and Toronto, both of whom have underperformed on the real ice as well this year. Boston, with a huge lead in the Eastern Conference through 62 games, has seen probably the biggest surge in the eBay standings, followed by Washington and Philadelphia (two more teams having excellent seasons — funny how that works, huh?).

In the Western Conference, the NHL’s best team so far this year, San Jose, still has a ways to go to catch defending champion Detroit in terms of eBay sales — but considering how poised the Sharks look for a long playoff run and possible championship, they might just be the best investment out there!

Not surprisingly, the three biggest money-makers over the past 30 days are Detroit, Pittsburgh and Montreal, with small-market Buffalo in fourth followed by the remaining Original 6 teams. Consider, at the other end of the ice, that the Red Wings are outselling the least-lucrative team on eBay, the Predators, by a ratio of 14-to-1! The rest of the bottom five, in order of “best” to worst, are Carolina, Columbus, Florida, and Atlanta.

You can view the full index at http://www.terapeak.com/nhl, and a link to the widget just right of the magnifying glass. View all of our indexes at http://www.terapeak.com/indexes.