SCoC will brave the deep unknown for as long as you’ll have us.

Hey. We gotta make this official since the rest of the SBN-NHL sphere has done so, so here’s where it stands.

Today, we learned that Vox was cutting about 7% of it’s staff, which roughly translated to about 95% of the NHL Staff, and pretty much all of the MLS team as well. 28 blogs will officially no longer receive Vox support and monetary compensation for their coverage of teams, leaving six left full time.

Stanley Cup Of Chowder is one of those six.

As for the reasons we were spared, we don’t have any. Your guess is as good as ours. Maybe our overhead was just low enough that it didn’t warrant it. Maybe our press pass makes SBN look good. We’re not getting answers, and I don’t think we ever will. But we are alive. For now, anyway.

Our hearts break of course for those who were affected; many of whom we worked closely with, like those working at Eyes on the Prize or Pension Plan Puppets or Raw Charge or Litter Box Cats or Silver Sens. I’m especially gutted for The Ice Garden, which took a great many disparate women’s hockey writers and consolidated some of the best minds on that particular part of our sport into one easy to read location. It’s borderline criminal what’s happened to them and to marginalized and often forgotten communities like Five For Howling, the California blogs, On The Forecheck serve. It’s insane that robust drivers of content should be chosen to shut down, like Broad St. Hockey or Blueshirt Banter. But it is the way of things

The hockey internet, analysis, and culture will be far worse for this having happened, and we wish them a safe and quick landing on their feet, whatever form that takes.

From Dan, our stalwart Editor in Chief:

This was previously posted in our morning thread:

Obviously things aren’t quite “status quo” here, as we’re all pretty mad about the other sites getting treated this way and can’t help but wonder if/when the other shoe is going to drop. Part of what made this network special was that there was a home for every team - you could go see what XYZ fans were posting about their team the day before a match-up, for example.

It was easy to get that unique perspective. It was very personalized, yet collective at the same time, if that makes sense. Ultimately, we’re still here. I think we all feel a degree of guilt about it - I know I do, as several of the sites that were cut today were ones I looked at as “wow, they do amazing work.” I’m proud of the work my small staff does and certainly think we deserve to stay, but a whole bunch of great sites that were cut today can say the same. It’s just a sad situation.

We’re also grateful to all of you who read, comment, argue, etc. as clearly those in charge saw something worth keeping in this site.

I’ve been running this site for six (yikes) years now and we’ve generated millions and millions of page views during that time, along with tens of thousands of comments (if not hundreds). At some point, it’ll come to an end, but I guess that time isn’t now.

This place is special for a number of reasons. I would certainly understand if people see today’s news and decide they don’t want to support Vox by reading here anymore, but I hope you’ll stick around.

We’ll continue to do our best to make this site the best it can be.

How do you feel about all this?

Kinda like this.

If you know, you know.

We’re still keeping this light on.

Stanley Cup of Chowder was founded less than a year after SBNation was as Athletics Nation. It’s been here far before Jim Bankoff rolled his way into the parent company. Far before it rebranded as Vox.

SCoC’s logo in Chorus, our editor, is still what it was back when SBN first acquired the blog in the late 2000’s; an awkward little squared logo from before SBN picked up an obsession with circles. It has passed from hand to hand to hand and has had excellent writers from Jake Reiser to Sara Civian to Corny to Remy to Evan C to Phunwin, to actual living breathing hockey players write for us. To this day, we have Angelina kicking ass and both of our Dans and Nathan and Chris and all of you bouncing idea after idea after idea.

SCoC will live on regardless of how the parent company chooses to go in the future, and whatever form it takes, we’ll make sure you all get there with your Gamethread buddies and you will know about it well and ahead of time.

So that’s that. We’ll see you Sunday evening against San Jose.

Go Bruins.