Question

Today I sought to answer the question, “Which sports league has the most solo team locations (Only professional team in town)?”. Instead of trying to Duck this, I chose to use Google Sheets to answer this for me. In order to avoid inconsistent location naming between teams in the same location (ie: New England Patriots and Boston Red Socks both play in Boston), the team locations were ‘normalized’ enough to be useful.

My data sheet used to generate the answer -> ODS PDF

Answer(s) (as of time of writing)

The NHL has the most solo team cities with 10 (Calgary, Columbus, Edmonton, Montreal, Newark, Ottawa, Raleigh, San Jose, Vancouver, Winnipeg). It should be noted that 6 of them are in Canada.

If we exclude Canadian cities (for being located in a silly place)

The NBA has the most solo team American cities with 7 (Memphis, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Antonio)

future work (?)

  • what if the MLS is included?
  • NCAA ? (how would that be normalized?)
  • market size w.r.t. number of teams present