StickiWidgets

We’ve been looking a long time for a NHL playoff widget. We even hit up our buddy Hooman over at Clearspring to see what he could do. Nothing… Well, we did find a “Chase For The Cup” widget. The only problem is it’s not available for public consumption. This is both unfortunate and baffling.

The widget is actually pretty good. It displays the match ups by round with scheduling information, scores and series count. Clicking the games listed, “STATS” button or “MATCHUP” button will take you to more information on FoxSports.com. This is where we start our confusion.

We imagine most hockey fans/bloggers would love to have access to this widget. And, since it drives traffic back to FOX Sports, we don’t see any reason not to distribute the widget. On the contrary, we believe that FOX Sports would be better served by sending this widget into the wild and letting it go viral. Sports fans want information, scores aren’t good enough. This need for information will result in click-thrus to the home site.

Add to this, the fact that this widget is already a Fox product. It’s used on their FoxSports.com NHL home page. All they had to do was talk to the guys over at Fox Interactive Media SpringWidgets and get the widget into the distribution platform. We even commented about the Fox backed benefits in our original review of SpringWidgets. The idea that the widget platform and in-house developers could have access to the myriad of Fox content seemed like a blessing. SpringWidgets even launched with a couple of sports widgets, Scoreboard and NFL GameTrax. For March Madness, they released the Hoops Hysteria widget. So, we ask, why not the “Chase For The Cup” widget?

Below is a screen capture of the widget. For the real thing check out the FoxSports.com NHL page. If they make it public, we’ll be more than happy to embed it on our site and push traffic back to FOX Sports.

Here’s a great hockey song and video to kick off your Friday and end your week. We’re not Wild fans around here. The Kings are where it’s at, but this video is deserving of a post and hockey is hockey. Play Hard!

Grabbed this via Widgets Lab.

For those of you who may have missed the 2007 NHL All-Star Game or if you just want to relive the moments. Here is the highlight clip from the NHL YouTube channel. This was a high scoring game with the Western Conference beating out the Eastern Conference, 12-9.

As for the full game, we are patiently watching the NHL on Google Video page to see if it will appear there. Unfortunately, we’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen to the NHL and Google deal. With news of the new Google and YouTube strategy, it is unclear if Google Video will move to more of a search engine status and drop video sharing or if they will continue the video sharing features to compliment those of YouTube. We can only wait and hope that they continue to provide full NHL games on Google Video.

In the meantime we still have NHL Plays of The Week on YouTube and full games at NHL on Google Video. So, enjoy it while it’s still there.