NHL Players in the 2008 World Championships

If you need a reason to watch the World Championships then I'll give you one: Alexander Ovechkin. The following is a list, country by country of NHL players who are on preliminary team rosters for the IIHF World Championships. The games start May 2nd, official roster lists must be handed in on May 1st.

Canada

Cam Ward
Pascal Leclaire
Mathieu Garon
Dan Hamhuis
Jay Bouwmeester
Brent Burns
Duncan Keith
Steven Staios
Mike Green
Ed Jovanovski
Derek Roy
Patrick Sharp
Eric Staal
Chris Kunitz
Jonathan Toews
Kyle Turris
Shane Doan
Jason Chimera
Martin St. Louis
Ryan Getzlaf
Rick Nash
Sam Gagner
Jason Spezza

Czech Republic

Tomas Kaberle
Filip Kuba
Jan Hejda
Zbynek Michalek
Ladislav Smid
Karel Rachunek
Patrik Elias
Karel Rachunek
David Krejci
Tomas Fleischmann
Radim Vrbata
Martin Hanzal
Ales Kotalik
Jiri Novotny

Denmark

Frans Nielsen

Finland

Karri Ramo
Ville Koistinen
Joni Pitkanen
Mikko Koivu
Olli Jokinen
Tuomo Ruutu
Ville Peltonen
Sean Bergenheim
Jussi Jokinen
Niko Kapanen

France

Cristobal Huet

Germany

Dennis Seidenberg
Christoph Schubert
Marco Sturm

Russia

Denis Grebeshkov
Dmitri Kalinin
Maxim Afinogenov
Ilya Kovalchuk
Alexander Ovechkin
Alexander Semin
Sergei Fedorov
Alexander Radulov

Slovakia

Branislav Mezei
Lubomir Visnovsky
Marcel Hossa

Slovenia

Anze Kopitar

Sweden

Erik Ersberg
Mikael Tellqvist
Magnus Johansson
Niclas Wallin
Alexander Edler
Anton Stralman
Nicklas Backstrom
Marcus Nilson
Robert Nilsson

Switzerland

Martin Gerber
Jonas Hiller

United States

Craig Anderson
Tim Thomas
Keith Ballard
Tom Gilbert
Tim Gleason
Matt Greene
Paul Martin
Mark Stuart
James Wisniewski
David Backes
David Booth
Dustin Brown
Adam Burish
Jeff Halpern
Patrick Kane
Phil Kessel
Peter Mueller
Patrick O'Sullivan
Zach Parise
Jason Pominville
Drew Stafford
Lee Stempniak

Belarus, Italy, Latvia, and Norway do not have any NHL players listed at the moment. As stated this can all change up till the 1st of May.

IIHF Retro Jerseys at 2008 World Championships

Despite what statistics and news coverage would have you believe there are actually people who care about the IIHF World Championships. The Swedes for one, who on a daily basis have covered the Stanley Cup playoffs in the news - not for the sake of reporting on the potential winners, but rather the potential losers. You have to be out of the playoffs if you want to be in the World Championships which will start in the coming week. (Who schedules this?)

In addition to the hype surrounding the event purely based on this year's host Canada, the IIHF is also celebrating it's 100th anniversary and what better way to do so then to bring back some of the great jerseys of yesteryear. Team's will be wearing vintage jerseys for one game during the preliminary round. These jerseys, which include Canada's infamous 1976 Canada Cup style, can be seen on the IIHF's website here: IIHF Vintage Jerseys, (also includes game times). The US will be wearing jerseys from 1960 - the first time they won the gold medal in the US. (Some great photos can be found here.

No doubt these will be popular with fans, and depending on which players actually do decide to take part in the tournament could sell pretty well. With things starting in just 3 days we should see them available for sale soon.

In the photo - yes, that is Bobby Orr and that is what Canada will proudly be wearing vs the US on May 6th.

JerseyDatabase.com BETA Released

After a few months of work and a lot of testing the first version of JerseyDatabase.com is now up and available for use. It is a site much like HockeyWidgets.com although it is completely dedicated to the jerseys in the database and makes it a bit easier to browse and use the different functions available.

At the moment it is still in a Beta or testing phase as I continue to add some more features to it. One thing that will separate it from the database on this site is that you can now create an account and create lists of jerseys on-line and share them with others. This will eventually be tied to a couple of different widgets and also include the ability to make calendars etc. For the moment you can create lists etc, more is coming..

As always, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. I have attempted to keep things as simple as intuitive as possible and hopefully this will make it an easier site to navigate and use for people trying to find particular jerseys etc.

The forum link comes back to the forum on this site, since it really didn't seem to be a good idea to create a new one as both databases are identical.

So, without further ado, check out the new JerseyDatabase.com - here.

Cup Companion 2.0 Now Available

Last year there was seemingly a demand to use the sweaters for this widget rather than the beveled buttons, so this year I have done away with the confusing colored blobs and have used the same jerseys used in the other widgets for this one.

Cup Companion 2.0 doesn't contain anything that wasn't there last year, it is still just a simple way of keeping track of the different series in the playoffs. Each round shows the competing teams and the current standing in their series, clicking on them will show you the schedule for the 7 games of that series. If a game has been completed the winner will be highlighted, and the loser slightly transparent. The same principle works for the series standings, once a team wins a 4th game, the other team will be faded.

This is not live scoring, it works on the same data that powers the IceTime widget, that is to say games are updated after they have completed. Some of the games do not have official start times as of yet, in those cases I have used the most predictable time expected, once they become official I will update them.

As always, with any problems at all feel free to make a comment here or use the Contact form listed above.

You will need to update your current version to 2.0 for this years games, I expect all future seasons to work without any future updates.

Both the Dashboard and the Yahoo! Widgets versions are available here.