NHL All Star Game 2011 Rosters: Following The Staal, Lidstrom Live Draft

Welcome to the live blog for the 2011 NHL All-Star Game Draft, I am your host, Chris Minniti, a Featured Columnist of the Detroit Red Wings.

The wonderful people at Bleacher Report asked me to do a live blog for the ASG draft and I accepted.

The All-Star Game is slated to be held this Sunday, January 30 at 4:00pm in Raleigh, North Carolina.

A little background about tonight's draft:

This is the first time in NHL history that the draft will take place.

On January 18, Eric Staal, from the hometown Carolina Hurricanes, was named captain of one team and Nicklas Lidstrom, veteran of 18 NHL season and 40 years old, was named captain of the other team.

Earlier last week, Vancouver Canucks Ryan Kesler and Washington Capitals Mike Green were named Eric Staals alternate captains while Chicago Blackhawks winger Patrick Kane and Tampa Bay Lightning Martin St. Louis were named Nicklas Lidstrom's alternates.

To start it all off, a coin flip will take place to see which team gets the first overall pick.

After that, the picks will take place.

The players in the pool for this years All-Star Game are as follows

Goalies:

Tim Thomas            
Marc-Andre Fleury
Carey Price
Jonas Hiller
Henrik Lundqvist
Cam Ward

Defense:

Kris Letang
Duncan Keith
Dan Boyle
Brent Burns
Dustin Byfuglien
Zdeno Chara
Erik Karlsson
Marc Staal
Shea Weber
Keith Yandle

Forwards:

Jonathan Toews
David Backes
Danny Briere
Matt Duchene
Patrik Elias
Loui Eriksson
Claude Giroux
Martin Havlat
Phil Kessel
Anze Kopitar
Rick Nash
Alex Ovechkin
Corey Perry
Brad Richards
Daniel Sedin
Henrik Sedin
Patrick Sharp
Jeff Skinner
Steven Stamkos
Paul Stastny 

Ill also be following these story lines:

With Martin St. Louis an alternate captain for Team Lidstrom, is he going to want to try and grab Steven Stamkos?

Will Lidstrom elect to try and choose the strong Swede contingent represented here this weekend?

Will the Sedin twins be facing off against each other for the first time in their lives?

Will Eric Staal try to get younger brother Marc on his team?

Will Eric try to draft Cam Ward, who is his fellow teammate on Carolina?

With Kane having a higher role this time, will he tell Lidstrom to avoid fellow teammate on Chicago, Jonathan Toews?

The action kicks off at 8:00pm ET and be sure to follow up to the second updates here on Bleacher Report!

Read more NHL news on BleacherReport.com