Honestly, I think having an active cable subscription these days is more of a rip-off than it's ever been. I pretty much advise all of my friends (especially those who want to watch hockey, including local, out-of-market, and nationally broadcast games) to cancel their cable subscription immediately, and do the following:
-Sign up for NHL GameCenter Live through your desktop/laptop
-Sign up for unblock.us through your desktop/laptop
-Set up unblock.us (they have an instruction video that explains it all very easily)
-At this point, you're essentially region-free or whatever in terms of regular-season and post-season NHL. You can watch every game by every team on perfect feeds with blackouts, no pop-ups, or low-res video, no worries about malware.
-If you've got an Xbox, and Playstation, or a Roku set up to your TV, all you need to do is run the NHL GameCenter Live app from one of those. (I suggest the Roku, as it's a better all-round media device.) If you don't have any of those, you can always run an HDMI cable from your desktop/laptop and watch the feeds on your TV that way. You can also download the mobile/tablet app and watch games on your iPad or iPhone or whathaveyou.
-So now you're all set up for watching hockey. If you've got other subscription-based streaming services--like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu, or whatever--you can use those apps on your XBox/PS/Roku/PC to watch those movies and TV shows as well. (Netflix--streaming only, no mail-based service--is a great value because it offers a decent amount of good movies plus a ton of older shows. Hulu is a great value because it offers a ton of more recent TV shows, and some good movies as well--including access to the entire Criterion Collection of DVDs. Amazon Prime Instant is included with your Amazon Prime subscription, and has a good amount of stuff as well, but a lot of it is covered by other services.)
-But what about your precious, precious cable? Your HBO, your Showtime, your ESPN, your Comedy Central, your major networks like NBC, CBS, Fox, whatever? ("OMG I have to watch GAME OF THRONES!!!") If you're unfamiliar with web-based streaming services (and it sounds like the OP might be), you should know that just about every single one of those channels has their own streaming app, just like Netflix/Amazon/Hulu. All you need to use any of those is the login info for a working cable subscription through any provider.
-So here's the one and only tricky part. You need to find a friend or family member who is willing to share their cable login info with you. Seriously, I called my mom who's old and has a Comcast mega-subscription that includes every channel known to man, and I was like "Ma, what's your online Comcast login info?" She didn't even know what I was talking about. So, after calming her nerves and promising her that I wasn't going to change or plan or order any porn or whatever, she let me find and borrow her login info. I used that to sign into HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Watch ESPN, and pretty much every other channel you'd be paying for to watch on cable. All for free.
-If you don't have a family member who has a full cable subscription with the channels you want to use, find a trustworthy friend who does and offer them your NHL GameCenter Live subscription info in exchange for their cable login info. I have never, ever had any issues on either side with not being able to log into a channel or service when someone else is logged in. I've had the same apps opened on several different machines at once, and never gotten kicked.
