UPDATE: Full release now appears below. Deal calls for every Stanley Cup playoff game to be televised nationally as well as introduces a new national broadcast on the Friday following Thanksgiving.

Reports are out, including this one from Yahoo Sports' Puck Daddy blog, that the NHL is sticking with NBC/Versus for the next ten years. With Fox and Turner sports out of the running, the deal came down to either moving back to ESPN or continuing with the league's current broadcast partners.

SBJ's John Ourand confirmed earlier reports of the duration and value of the deal on Twitter this morning. The NHL will receive $2 billion over the course of the next decade from NBC/Comcast to broadcast NHL games on both cable channel Versus and NBC affiliate stations.

This deal represents a substantial increase in revenue from the flat fee of nearly $80 million from Versus and the revenue sharing arrangement with NBC. Next on the NHL's agenda will be renegotiating Canadian TV rights.

The decision was not a free choice for the NHL. NBC and Versus had the right to match any deal that ESPN or another network could have struck with the league, limiting the NHL's options greatly. The only way another network could woo them successfully would have involved making it financially unpalatable to NBC and Versus, which would have necessitated making the NHL a loss leader with their new outlet. That's never a good way to begin a television contract.

With labor woes plaguing the NFL and threatening the NBA, the NHL acted quickly to shore up its position among the major sports entertainment properties. The move ensures revenue for the league as it struggles to continue to bounce back from their own disastrous work stoppage that cancelled the entirety of the 2004-05 season. Looming a season away is the expiration of the NHL's current CBA with its players, which could imperil the 2012-13 season.

One of the contentious issues framing those discussions is expected to be the League's shutdown every four years so NHLers can participate in the winter Olympics. Last year's thrilling USA-Canada gold medal game in the Vancouver games was a huge boost to the League's image by giving stars like Ryan Miller and Sidney Crosby a platform on the league's broadcast partner's premier winter sporting event. But 2014's games are in Sochi, Russia, and game times will not fall neatly into the USA's primetime broadcast slots.

But with the league's biggest source of revenue possessing a vested interest in the participation of the game's biggest stars, the odds of NHL participation in the 2014 Sochi games just increased markedly.

Another hurdle for the league is current NHLPA director Donald Fehr. Fehr took the helm last fall in a move that prompted the Biz of Hockey's Matthew Coller and Jeff Levine to speculate on the ramifications for the upcoming CBA talks. Fehr remains a polarizing figure from his stewardship of the MLBPA, but as Coller noted, "the average player’s salary went from $330,000 to more than $2 million. The minimum salary went from $40,000 to $200,000" during Fehr's tenure. With the league's new sources of cash, the players have the right man for the job of ensuring they get a fair cut of the action.

Read the complete release by clicking here.

What is more entertaining to NHL fans than a raucous hockey game at Jobing.com Arena in Glendale Arizona? The answer is, quite frankly, the yet to come commentary by Coyotes tough guy and Twitter virtuoso Paul Bissonnette.

Bissonnette, a self-proclaimed “4th line duster” for the playoff-bound Phoenix Coyotes, has managed to harness Twitter to forge an identity for himself that transcends his role as a sparingly used role player. His treasure trove of one-liners has won him thousands of Twitter followers that, despite his lack of ice time, have turned him into an unlikely magnet for sponsorship dollars.

The end game for Bissonnette was never for Twitter to become a marketing tool. He initially created his Twitter account on the recommendation of former teammate Scottie Upshall and thought it would be fun to use Twitter in a way that suited his style.

“I have no filter and I like it when I get a rise out of people; that makes it fun,” explained Bissonnette in his short-lived Hockey News Blog. “I like to think outside the box and make it fun because that’s my personality.”

Although he currently spends his days as a sparingly used grinder and occasional pugilist, Bissonnette’s off the ice activities make him one of the pioneering professional athletes on Twitter. His consistently hilarious and random comments on the abbreviated social networking website have earned Bissonnette a cult following of over 67,000 followers that includes Yahoo’s Puck Daddy Blog.

“BizNasty” has also forged partnerships with Taco Bell and hockey lifestyle apparel company Sauce Hockey. These niche deals work to maximize the former Pittsburgh Penguin’s marketability, and help to set up a career for Bissonnette after his playing days are over.

Bissonnette is one of just a few professional athletes that have harnessed new media such as Twitter and invested little more than their own time to make themselves into a brand. However, no brand is as unique as the one being forged by Bissonnette.

“It’s taken off,” said Bissonnette in a recent interview with ProHockeyTalk. “I’ve kind of taken it [tweeting] to the next level and people have kind of embraced it.”

Although he seems to have stumbled on this marketing method, more athletes should take a page from Bissonnette’s playbook as a means to connect with fans and sponsors as a means to shape their brand identity. However, like any activity, tweeting does have its potential hazards.

Over the summer, Bissonnette found himself in hot water over his Twitter comments made in jest about Ilya Kovalchuk’s seventeen-year contract being rejected by the NHL. Shortly thereafter, he deleted his Twitter account. Thankfully, Bissonnette came to his senses and created a new Twitter account.

Bissonnette’s Coyotes play the Red Wings tonight in game one of what should be a long and brutal first round playoff series. This is a rematch of last year’s first round series, which saw the upstart Coyotes push the veteran laden Wings to seven games before finally being eliminated. This series will probably be just as tight.

Although Bissonnette may not be a deciding factor in the box score of tonight’s game, one can assume that his presence will be felt on the ice (perhaps a fight), but most certainly shortly thereafter in the Twitter blogosphere, as he continues to shape his brand and sets himself up for life after hockey.

You can follow Bissonnette by clicking here @BizNasty2point0.

Jeff Levine is a staff member of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He is a sports attorney, and the Executive Director of One Sports and Entertainment, International.

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While most of the sports-watching public is awaiting the potential doomsday of both an NFL and NBA lockout in the fall, other sports leagues are looking to take advantage.

The Florida Panthers of the NHL, for example, have started using this advertising campaign on their website, which promotes the Panthers as a viable and desirable option for sports fans in normally crowded Florida market come November.

The slogan reads alongside two juxtaposed pictures of Panthers players and a football and basketball in a beach chair in an ocean setting:

In October 2011: We’re Guaranteed to Play. They’re not!

The Panthers’ campaign works under the understanding that many fans may not be willing to commit to buying tickets to Dolphins or Heat games because of the potential lockouts. In the ad, the organization also promotes its biggest matchups of the season with traditional hockey teams that Florida-transplants from the North may find enticing: Montreal, Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, Pittsburgh and Washington.

Since the NBA has some time before the June 30th expiration of its current collective bargaining agreement, the focus has been on the NFL’s negotiating crisis and how fans will respond to not having football every Sunday. The United Football League (UFL) is seeking to bank on the potential NFL lockout.

Even though ESPN authorities have said that they have “no current plans” to adopt UFL broadcasts if the NFL season is cut short or cancelled, the league is pushing itself as an option for professional football this fall.

“Every network is looking at content they have to fill in, and people are seeing us as a potential viable option,” UFL commissioner, Michael Huyghue told TSN.

Huyghue said the league lost $30 million in its inaugural season in 2009 and $50 million last season. But league officials are optimistic about where the league could escalate given the potential for a television contract granted there’s an NFL lockout.

“To be candid, we'd be crazy to quit now if there's going to be a lockout,” UFL Founder and Locos Owner Bill Hambrecht told KLAS-TV. “We'd be the only game in town. Almost under any circumstances, we have to see through what's going to happen with the lockout.”

Huyghue insists that the UFL’s plans are not contingent on an NFL lockout. “It's not a business strategy for us,” he said. “It's potentially an opportunity.”

The Florida Panthers and the UFL are two examples among many sports leagues and individual teams that could benefit from the elimination of competing with the NFL for viewership, attendance and attention.

While the Panthers are promoting an NFL lockout in their advertising, Huyghue and the UFL have approached the issue more cautiously.

“There's been so much anticipation for what a lockout might mean,” Huyghue told ESPN. “We're still around. Just breathing has a lot to do with the chance to succeed.”

Whether the UFL or NHL would actually benefit from an NFL lockout is yet to be seen.

Sloane Martin is the creator of the women's sports blog Same Size Balls. She is a sports broadcaster and freelance writer. She can be followed on Twitter.