from Mark Madden of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,

ESPN recently ranked the NHL’s Top 100 players and came nowhere close to getting it right.

Fifty experts were said to have been consulted. But I doubt the guy that did it even knows 50 experts. He’s a low-budget hack who tweets more about Star Wars than hockey. He gets paid minimum wage so ESPN can give Pat McAfee a trillion dollars. He’s exemplary of ESPN’s bare-bones commitment to hockey.

John Buccigross immediately said on X that he had not been consulted for the list. That reveals something.

Buccigross is excellent. But when you get past him, Steve Levy, Linda Cohn and maybe a few others, the hockey acumen at ESPN drops off a cliff.

The Pittsburgh Penguins got badly dissed in the rankings, most grotesquely via Evgeni Malkin being left off altogether. Not even honorable mention.

Malkin, 37, isn’t in his prime, though he started the season with seven points in four games to rank second in NHL scoring as of this writing.

But Malkin is for sure better than Tomas Hertl, Ryan O’Reilly, Owen Power, Sergei Bobrovsky, Morgan Rielly, J.T. Miller … you’ve got to go up several dozen from the bottom of ESPN’s list before you even run into any remote debate.

The previously cited low-budget hack then did a podcast where he admitted having erred by not including Malkin. In wrestling parlance, this is called shooting yourself into a work. Hey, I thought this was the result of polling 50 experts. Why are you apologizing?

Malkin was also left off the NHL’s all-time top 100 when the league celebrated its centennial in 2017.

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