Just went on Yahoo! Sports and the NBC Sports sites to see how their new arrangement is working out. You know what? They both looked the same to me.

Of course, it won’t be that way much longer. The two big powerhouses have come together in a partnership deal that they hope will allow them to better take on the biggest powerhouse, ESPN.

Here is a link with the details, but essentially the big element of the deal boils down this: Yahoo! gains access to all-important video from NBC Sports; NBC receives Yahoo!’s critical mass in terms of pageviews.

From the New York Times:

“Yahoo provides massive scale for the NBC Sports Group,” Mark Lazarus, the chairman of that group, said in an interview by phone on Sunday.

Though stopping far short of an actual merger, the two sites expect that their traffic will be measured together in a way that solidly makes them the No. 1 sports Web site in the United States. Yahoo came in a close second to ESPN in November rankings by the Web analytics company ComScore, which showed ESPN with 42 million unique visitors and Yahoo with 40 million. Sites operated by the NBC Sports Group ranked eighth, with 11 million visitors — evincing why NBC felt it necessary to find a new source of traffic.

Mr. Lazarus said that measuring the two together would “allow our sales force to walk into meetings with the ability to say we’re the No. 1 sports site.”

I expect the folks at ESPN.com may dispute that notion. There are all sorts of different ways to interpret the numbers when you factor in time spent on the site, etc.

Still, this is a very good deal for both Yahoo! Sports and NBC Sports. It makes them both stronger.

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A side note of the deal: Jason McIntyre of Big Lead has noted that Peter King’s contract is expiring at Sports Illustrated. He speculated the Yahoo!-NBC Sports deal may give him an enticing alternative.

McIntyre writes:

King is the No. 1 NFL insider for the most popular sport in the country, and he’ll be coveted by the likes of NBC Sports, ESPN, and probably even the NFL Network (even though few in the industry think he’d go there). Sports Illustrated could have a hard time keeping King, who has been there for 23 years.

Might this week’s Yahoo-NBC Sports deal have an impact on King’s situation with Sports Illustrated?

At the very least, it’ll give King some nice leverage with SI.