Reminder: The Minnesota Wild Are The Biggest Loser Franchise In The NHL

A few months ago I wrote a blog which was really designed to make myself feel better. It was the list of NHL teams who are the most “fucked“. I made it about the Senators and the Blue Jackets because well…nobody wants to play there and all their best players were on their way out. Somehow I made the mistake of leaving the Minnesota Wild off of this list and they definitely deserve to be on it. They have the opposite problem of those teams…they can’t get their most expensive players to leave. Suter is 34 years old and signed through 2025. Ditto for Parise. Both guys make $7.5M and the Wild will be saddled with those deals for a LONG time as they decline. And the thing about those guys being your franchise players…they’ve only ever been good enough to lose in the first round. Respectable losers. Impossible to rebuild. Impossible to grow. Just stuck in irrelevance.

That is not what makes them the biggest loser franchise in the NHL though. It’s this

The Wild have two banners hanging. A banner retiring the #1 for their fans. Worlds Best Fans. Gee whiz that’s nice. Minnesota nice. Aunt Kathy from Edina thinks that’s just swell. People always shit on the Indianapolis Colts for their AFC Finalist Banner

But at least the Colts have a Super Bowl banner hanging up next to it. The only other banner for the Wild

Division Champs of a division that no longer exists and spoiler…they lost in the first round. Sure, there are worse franchises. Arizona, Florida, Carolina, etc, but nobody is more pathetic. Those places don’t really care about hockey. It’s all Minnesota cares about. The Self-proclaimed “State of Hockey” is home to one of the most irrelevant franchises in the NHL and still have no path to anything but the middle. Central Division Participants.