Boston cements itself as Titletown USA; Miami makes a case for being a bona fide sports town
The Boston Celtics in the NBA and Florida Panthers in the NHL won championships this past month
In one of the least surprising sports storylines of the 2024 postseason the Boston Celtics won the NBA title this year, while Miami’s Florida Panthers won the NHL’s Stanley Cup over the Edmonton Oilers last week.
The Celtics’ championship was Boston’s 13th title since 1991 across all four major men’s sports, by far the most of any North American city in that timeframe. That extended the city’s lead in my made-up Titles over Expected1 metric to a +8.56 ToE.
Boston trails only San Antonio in share of championships won given how many teams are active in the city — its teams have won nearly 10 percent of the available championships across the four major men’s sports since 1991.
Meanwhile the Florida Panthers’ triumph over Edmonton in Game 7 of the NHL finals allowed Miami fans to witness their team hoist its first Stanley Cup on home ice in *checks notes* Sunrise, Fla. The victory pushed Miami into the Top-10 in ToE with 1.69 more championships than expected in the past three decades.
I was especially interested in this series because the Oiler’s loss means one of the best curses in sports will live on — Canada’s Cup drought will now extend to 31 years, and marks the country’s fifth straight loss in Game 7s of the Stanley Cup Finals.
Titles over Expected is a metric I created to quantify how a region is indexing against others in sports championships won. As I documented in a previous post about the topic the methodology and assumptions I employed to arrive at this metric is as follows:
I looked at the metropolitan areas where championships were won in the four North American men's professional sports leagues -- the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL.
I arbitrarily used 1991 as the starting point because that was the year I was born.
I'm defining teams' markets as the metropolitan areas in which their fans are typically found. For example, I'm lumping all of Wisconsin's major professional sports teams into the greater Milwaukee area because the Green Bay Packers, who play their home games two hours north at Lambeau Field, called Milwaukee home for a portion of their games through the 1990s and are effectively the entire state of Wisconsin's team. Similarly, the Golden State Warriors, who won multiple NBA titles while based in Oakland, Calif., would be considered part of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The New York Giants and New York Jets are included as New York City teams, despite the fact both teams play in New Jersey. The NHL's New Jersey Devils are the lone Jersey team in this analysis.
An important call out is we are assuming every team in a league has an equal chance of winning a championship each season, a fact we know isn't true in practice. Those chances vary across different sports as well. The NBA, for example, is much more deterministic than a sport like hockey -- hockey is inherently random given the units of success (goals) don't happen very often, unlike in basketball where 100+ points scored is the norm in an NBA game.