Forbes.com named “America’s Best Sports Teams” (yet included the Montreal Canadiens ... although I guess they wear something resembling America’s colors) and four NHL teams made the list.
These lists are often flawed because they tend to ignore history (opening the door for dreaded “bandwagon” teams). Really, judging from their write-up regarding the list’s criteria, a more accurate headline would probably be “North America’s Most Relatively Profitable Teams.” But I digress ...
To produce a list of the best fans in U.S. sports, we looked at every team in the “Big Four” U.S. professional sports leagues: football (NFL), basketball (NBA), baseball (MLB), and hockey (NHL).
For each team, we gathered three different metrics. First, we measured their home and away game attendance, which indicates a team’s drawing power in its home market and nationwide. Then we counted their merchandise sales (Numbers for the NFL, NBA and MLB were provided to us by Sportsonesource, a sporting good industry analyst, and the NHL gave us their own data). Finally, we ranked each team’s in-market popularity, based on surveys of American sports teams by Turnkey Sports and Entertainment. We ranked all of the teams, then took the top four from each of the four leagues.
16. Chicago Blackhawks
11. Montreal Canadiens
6. Pittsburgh Penguins
3. Detroit Red Wings
If you’re wondering who made it in front of the Red Wings, it was the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers (No. 2) and MLB’s Boston Red Sox (No. 1). These lists are engineered for debates, so I’ll play the game: are those the four teams who represent the four most devoted fan bases in the NHL? Should the Red Wings/highest ranked NHL team come in higher than No. 3? Share your thoughts in the comments.