Newcomers Denver and Las Vegas win championship rings this spring
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Newcomers Denver and Las Vegas win championship rings this spring
Denver won its first NBA championship while Las Vegas took home its first ever title with a Stanley Cup in this year's playoffs
The odds-on favorites to win the NBA and NHL championships this season both resided in Boston. But instead of extending our national nightmare of another Boston title, two cities — Denver and Las Vegas — won their first NBA and NHL rings, respectively.
In Denver’s case the Nuggets knocked off the Miami Heat in five games, while the Vegas Golden Knights won the NHL’s most coveted prize with a 4-1 series win of their own against another Miami team, the Florida Panthers.
It was Denver’s first NBA championship, which helped move the city into sixth place in my Titles over Expected (ToE
) metric with 2.89 more championships than we would expect given how many teams it has in the big four men’s North American sports leagues. Denver now has seven championships to its name with three apiece from both the NFL’s Broncos and NHL’s Avalanche, and now one from the Nuggets.These pro leagues used to avoid the city of Las Vegas like the plague. But with the legalization of sports gambling in many states paving the way for acceptance of Sin City as a sports town, it has come to embrace pro teams within the city’s walls. The Vegas Golden Knights and the Las Vegas Raiders are the town’s two current professional teams, while the Oakland A’s will be reportedly moving there in a couple years as well.
While the Knights made history by reaching (and losing) the Stanley Cup finals in the 2017-18 NHL season as an expansion team, they capped off an unprecedented start to a franchise with a title this season. That feat moved Vegas from non-existent to 15th on the list in ToE. With a 10 percent share it now only trails San Antonio in the percentage of available championships of all metro areas.
The city of Miami had several opportunities to move up the list but couldn’t close the deal in their respective finals series. Both the Heat and Panthers were considered underdogs according to FiveThirtyEight entering the NBA and NHL finals, but together had a 58 percent chance at bringing hardware home to the Magic City.
Interestingly a single sports region has never won the NBA Championship and the NHL Stanley Cup in the same season
. In the postseasons’ early going it looked like Boston might pull off the feat before Miami took the baton, but in the end it was all for naught as Denver and Vegas cemented themselves as bona fide sports towns as their teams ended the year with the championship parades.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.