Hunter Hodies
Hunter Hodies covers the Pittsburgh Penguins organization with a tight focus on day-to-day team news, roster decisions, and game-level analysis across the NHL club and its affiliates. His work blends straight news reports, recurring “3 Takeaways” game columns, and podcast breakdowns that follow how injuries, contracts, and development choices shape each season for the Penguins. He brings more than a decade of digital sports media experience to the beat, combining written coverage with regular audio shows built around the team.
Pittsburgh Penguins news and game coverage
Hodies is a writer and co-editor dedicated to the Pittsburgh Penguins vertical at The Hockey News, where he writes and edits news and feature articles on the team.
His responsibilities include game previews, game recaps, trade-target pieces, and general news stories, giving him a broad remit across both breaking updates and scheduled coverage. Recent work includes reporting on the Penguins’ preseason roster for a game against the Buffalo Sabres, highlighting lineup decisions and evaluative opportunities early in the season.
Beyond single news hits, he uses both articles and podcasts to track training camp and positional battles over time, rather than treating them as one-off stories. Episodes and posts focused on goalie competition, forward previews, and camp observations show him returning to the same roster questions as they evolve, tying practice performance, coaching decisions, and player comments back to what they mean for the opening-night lineup.
This mix of news writing and ongoing camp coverage distinguishes his work from a basic game-only beat, giving a rolling view of how the roster is built and adjusted before and during the season.
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and organizational depth
Hodies extends his coverage beyond the NHL roster to the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, treating the AHL affiliate as a critical part of the organization rather than a separate circuit. His “3 Takeaways” piece on Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s loss in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Final against Toronto is a clear example, breaking down key themes and performance trends in a playoff setting for the farm team. In podcast work he also revisits the affiliate’s progress, including discussion of Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s Game 3 win and what that success means inside the broader Penguins system.
Prospects and lower-level affiliates enter his coverage through contract and affiliation stories, such as a detailed look at Ville Koivunen’s extension and the implications of Wheeling becoming a new affiliate of the Columbus Blue Jackets. These pieces and segments show him mapping how prospect decisions, AHL results, and ECHL affiliations feed into the Penguins’ long-term roster and development strategy. For stories where organizational depth is central, his approach leans on concrete game outcomes, contract terms, and affiliate changes rather than speculative prospect rankings.
Podcast analysis and fan-focused coverage
Hodies is the co-host of the Locked On Penguins podcast, a regular audio show that gives him space to move beyond straight news into detailed discussion and fan-facing analysis. Across episodes he covers positional battles, offseason recaps, and league events from a Penguins angle, including debates over goalie competition, an offseason review, and the impact of hiring a new rinkside reporter.
He uses these formats to tie news items - such as Mario Lemieux selling his remaining ownership shares - back to questions about the franchise’s direction and identity.
The podcast feed also features recurring segments designed around the fan base, such as “Fan Take Friday,” where he and his co-host work through topics like jersey retirements, Ville Koivunen’s profile, and team theme nights. Other episodes tackle macro issues like the NHL Global Series matchup between the Penguins and Predators and the league’s salary-cap environment, blending schedule preview with cap and roster implications. His work on another show, Pucks N’at, includes discussion of Erik Karlsson’s injury and recent roster moves, using the injury as a starting point to examine how the team’s plans might be affected over the season.
Taken together, these podcasts show a consistent style: structured segments, clear themes, and an emphasis on explaining why each news item matters to Penguins fans.
Injuries, contracts, and cap dynamics
Injury news and its consequences recur across Hodies’ coverage, from tagged injury reports on the Penguins beat to deeper audio conversations about how high-profile absences change roles and expectations. The Karlsson injury episode is one example, pairing the immediate update with broader reflections on defensive performance and the team’s trajectory. Contract and salary-cap topics sit alongside this, with episodes and segments devoted to the NHL salary cap, Ville Koivunen’s extension, and ongoing talk around Sidney Crosby’s contract.
He treats these subjects as threads that run through the season, rather than isolated transaction notes, returning to cap space, extension terms, and contract timelines as the roster shifts. His background in breaking news and in-depth sports coverage supports this approach, allowing him to move quickly on updates while still placing them in context for listeners and readers.
Across articles and podcasts, this emphasis on injuries, contracts, and cap dynamics marks his work out from more basic game-story coverage, giving stakeholders a clear view of both the nightly results and the long-term constraints that shape the Penguins.
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