Summer's winding down, but I've still got time for a few house-cleaning posts to sneak in here.

SB Nation. A bit of a wild ride. First of all, I owe a long overdue thanks to Greg Wyshynski for his kind words on the network (and for putting us ahead of Mike Commodore's disturbing money shot). Wyshynski himself has only been up and running for about 16 months, and he's already a big, big influence on hockey coverage online so kudos to him.

When Tyler Bleszinski contacted me last October and asked that I join SBN, I honestly knew very little about the network outside of stopping by its Leafs blog once in a while. And, looking over the hockey content they had at the time — six or seven NHL blogs, with at least one abandoned — pulling together what they had in mind in the next five months seemed, well, a little nuts.

Thankfully, with a lot of smart people behind the scenes and many more signing on, things have turned out quite well. It's incredibly satisfying to now see sites like Pension Plan Puppets and PensBurgh with audiences 10 or 20 times larger than what they were only eight or nine months ago. Other established sites like Japers' Rink, Canes Country, On The Forecheck and St. Louis Game Time — several of which are credentialed to cover their teams — joined early on, and the rest was easy.

People just started to buy into what we were building, and they still do.

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Islanders Point Blank is no longer the "team-sponsored blog." As a result, Point Blank may not be around much longer.

Like just about everything in sports, it’s only business. Nothing personal, and it’s certainly not about anything I’ve written that the franchise may not have loved.

— Chris Botta

Ten months ago, the Islanders "longtime media relations VP" Chris Botta started a new blog called Islanders Point Blank, a site bankrolled by the team and which quickly grew an enormous following.

At 7:17 p.m. on Wednesday night, Botta broke the bad news above. Six hours later, there are 318 comments, with No. 318 expressing what most have expressed in one word: "Heartbreaking."

Based on his audience size — which he pegs at about 400,000 unique visitors a month — Botta is one of the most read hockey bloggers out there and likely the most read one not affiliated with a major media outlet. Despite the popularity of his site, however, Botta's come to the conclusion (the right one, in my opinion) that it would be very difficult attempting to make it on his own as a blogger:

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