TSN Top 50 List Includes No Minnesota Wild Players

It is a rite of passage at this point. A major sports outlet discusses the best of the NHL and either completely botches the facts about the Wild, or they simply pretend they don't exist. Craig Leipold wants to raise the profile of the team to get them into a Winter Classic type event. Judging by the season previews and other "coverage" of the Wild, he still has a long way to go.

Bodog has the team earning around 83 points, a number certain to keep them out of the playoffs. Most sites have them finishing outside the playoffs, many near the bottom of the league. None of this is good, and the sheer mass of negativity surrounding the team makes you start to wonder what the deal is.

Make the jump and lets take a look at this list. Help us out. Who is too high? Too low? Not on the list but should be?

The list is broken up into five pages, each page containing 10 players. We'll take this one page at a time. 

Wild Snubbed

Eric Staal, Anze Kopitar, Chris Pronger, and Marian Hossa make the list, but Koivu doesn't? Given a choice among those five players, Koivu gets picked before all but maybe one of them, and Hossa only goes first if a Hawks fan is involved.

The Wild are not going to light up the world anytime soon. I get that, but how do you leave a guy universally included in the "best two way forward" conversation off the list?

I don't want to indulge in the "everyone hates the Wild" mentality. They can hate them all they want, they can pretend they don't exist at all. That's fine. But when putting together a list of the top 50 players in the league, and players who play the same game as Koivu, but not nearly as well, are included and he isn't? Someone messed up.

I need some of whatever the good Canadian stuff is there days.