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Notes:
The current teams are from the
four major professional team sports
leagues in North America: Major League
Baseball, the National Football League,
the National Basketball Association, and
the National Hockey League.
44 metropolitan areas are
represented. 122 total teams make up the
list. The oldest teams on this list have considered team-years originating in
the years when the most widely accepted
championships began. A note about those
years and other considerations that
apply to this list is
here.
The frequency is arrived
at by totaling all of a metro area’s
team/years (how many years each team has
been playing the sport in that
metropolitan area and is still there),
dividing that by how many chances per
year that metropolitan area has to win a
title (maximum of four, minimum of one),
and then dividing that by how many
titles total among all the teams.
Only currently existing
teams in their present locations are
counted in these totals. For instance,
relocated teams like the Brooklyn
Dodgers are not counted in the New York
metropolitan totals nor in the Los
Angeles totals. No defunct teams or
leagues are included in this total. It
may be asked why those teams and their
totals are not included here, but this
list is only for current teams, as those
teams now are the only viable ones for
present team fan consideration. While
someone may very well be fond of the
nostalgia that is the Brooklyn Dodgers
(and that team may indeed be considered
a beloved part of Los Angeles Dodgers
lore), that entity no longer exists and
today it is not possible for that entity
to win any championships. There may
certainly be a list of frequencies
with the no-longer-existing teams,
but this is not that list.
It must be said that the
Seattle metropolitan area is at the
bottom of the list with 69 team-years
and no championships, but the Seattle
Supersonics had an NBA title in 1979.
That team, however, is now in Oklahoma
City and is the Thunder.
Many
Milwaukee sports fans are certainly
still very fond of their 1957 Braves
team and revel in its championship – and
that could indeed be added to the
Milwaukee metropolitan area
success – but with that continued team
now in Atlanta, the franchise just as
readily claims that title for its
history. Several special
notes like these could be made about
certain metropolitan areas getting
titles from teams in previous
manifestations or while playing in other
localities, perhaps even in other
now-defunct leagues, but the note about
that has been made just above. (As of
this web page publication on June 18
2011, the Atlanta Thrashers have
committed to move to Winnipeg. When that
move is official the above totals for
Atlanta will change and Winnipeg will be
added to the list.)
The population figures
for metropolitan areas are in millions.
The U.S. figures are from 2006, the
Canada figures from 2007. Some metropolitan areas
are combined, while relatively close
areas are given distinctive metropolitan
areas. Los Angeles and San Diego are
considered two different areas here,
while Charlotte and Raleigh in North
Carolina (which are about the same
distance apart as LA and SD) are
considered one metro area mostly because
the teams from that metro area are by
their own profession representative of
not only all of North Carolina but South
Carolina as well. A number of other
qualifying notes could be made about
what localities qualify to be in a
metropolitan area, such as the fact that
here San Jose is considered part of the
San Francisco-Oakland area.
The NFL Buffalo Bills and
San Diego Chargers championships
considered here are their AFL
championships. See the note
here about the reason for this
exception.
One of
the
purposes in assembling this list
is to demonstrate that larger
metropolitan areas do have more
championships than smaller ones. It is
the opinion of this writer that teams in
those metro areas are
given certain advantages because
titles in larger metro areas generate
more revenue and engender greater legitimacy for the
leagues than do titles won in smaller
areas.
The fact that some teams have
been around longer because of their
large size is accounted for by using
team-years in the frequency
determination. A reasonable
critique is that
the
few teams in each of these leagues during the
early to mid-1900's
were all large market teams. If a
frequency determination were made,
however,
covering only the last twenty or thirty
years when the leagues were larger and
were comprised of many more smaller
market teams, the results would be the same:
Teams from larger markets have an
inordinate amount of success, and
again, I am convinced competitive
integrity is unjustly manipulated to
make it that way.
(June 2011 note:: The beat goes on
–
of the four championships for the year,
three of them were attained by three of
the largest markets: San Francisco
[Giants], Dallas [Mavericks], and Boston
[Bruins]. Last year (2009-2010) three
champions were from the three
largest markets overall: New York [Yankees], Los
Angeles [Lakers], and Chicago [Blackhawks].
Some exceptions to the
large market = more success
condition should be noted. Small market teams with
high frequency of titles:
Montreal – This is merely
because the Montreal Canadians were so
dominant in the NHL for so long. In
their 85 team-years the team has 22
championships. Other teams like this,
relatively high on the list, include the
NHL Edmonton Oilers and the NBA San
Antonio Spurs, who are there essentially
because of Wayne Gretzky and Tim Duncan,
respectively.
St. Louis – The baseball Cardinals have a
total of ten championships in their 108
team-years, and many of those titles were
won when St. Louis was one of the
largest metropolitan areas in the
country.
Milwaukee/Green Bay – The
NFL Packers are a darling of the pro
football world and the media that cover
them, and were indeed a
dominant team in the 1960’s. They have a
total of ten championships.
Pittsburgh – Like St. Louis, Pittsburgh was one of the larger
metropolitan areas in the nation in the
early-to-mid 1900’s. The baseball
Pirates won most of their titles at that
time. The city has also benefited by
having arguably the very best
ownership/management situation in their
NFL team, the Steelers.
Large
market teams with low frequency of
titles:
Seattle – The Mariners
have never had a consistently good team,
and the one great team they had in
2001 was devastated
in the AL playoffs
by, of all teams, the New
York Yankees, and they never made it to
the World Series. The Seahawks have
actually been very successful in making
the NFL playoffs, but have reached the Super
Bowl only once, in 2005 when they
dominated the game but lost because the
Steelers played a charmed game, winning
essentially on the strength of four
amazing crucial plays.
Atlanta – The Falcons and
Hawks have never played well
consistently. The baseball Braves,
however, were the dominant team of the
1990’s but came away with only one
championship. The team seemed to be
snake-bitten in the playoffs through
that decade and early 2000's, every year
falling apart and never fully carrying
their excellent play into the
post-season.
Phoenix – There is no
question the NBA Suns are one of the
unluckiest teams in professional team
sports. They barely lost the 1976 title
to the Celtics. They have made the
playoffs countless times and so often
came within a whisker of moving on for a
shot at the championship. Suns fans
would like to forget multiple crushing
playoff losses in the 90's and 00's to teams like the Rockets
and Spurs.
Houston – The NBA Rockets and their two championships are the one
saving grace for Houston. The football Oilers (now in Nashville as the
Tennessee Titans)
often played championship caliber
football but never got to a Super Bowl,
and the Astros are third on the list of
teams currently in their metro area for
the longest time and going without a
title. Only the football Vikings and
baseball Giants have gone longer in
futility.
Even so, none of these
four metro areas of note are
particularly large nor are they media
darling markets. The largest markets
still get the lion’s share of
championships. They are all there at the
top of the list: New York, Los Angeles,
Chicago (don’t be fooled by the Cubs
futility), Boston, Detroit, San
Francisco-Oakland, Washington-Baltimore,
Philadelphia, Dallas, and Miami.
It is the
humble intention of the author of this
site to update this once a year at
exactly this time. Few web hits are more
frustrating than a site with information
like this that is ten years old. The
latest update of this information was
made on June 18, 2011. The next update
will be in June 2012,
after which there will be a new major
league baseball
champion (October or November), a new NFL champion
(February), a new NHL champion and NBA
champion (June), and perhaps even some
teams moving about or going defunct (again, the
latest I heard, the NHL Atlanta
Thrashers were
heading to Winnipeg).
(For the record: In processing these
numbers for the 2010 update from the
2009 numbers I noted
that I'd made a handful of minor calculating
errors. For instance for Los Angeles I
had divided
the number of chances for a title for
that metro area by six instead of
three. I apologized for the error last
year but I do want to keep this note
here to be sure this list is fully
accurate:
If you see anything that requires
attention, I'd be happy to know about
it. You are welcome to
email
me. )
For
another arrangement of this, go to
Current Pro Sports Team Success.
NFL Team
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