I know the Forbes name has a lot of caché, and their team valuations are always spot on. But when it comes to lists like these — the best and worst NHL fans of the year — I’m not so sure they’re the right people to be making the call.
Then again, they’re Forbes, so we’ll listen.
Top top five (or six or seven) fan bases in the NHL last season, please.
Top Five:
1. Pittsburgh
2. Toronto
3. Philadelphia
4. Montreal
5 tie. Chicago
5 tie. Minnesota
5 tie. Detroit
I think it’s kind of obvious the beef we may have here, so there’s really no sense in saying it. I just have one question. I know it’s a list of the top fan bases of the year, not the decade or the century or whatever, and that it’s all according to numbers, but doesn’t recent history matter even a little bit? Does the fact that Pittsburgh and Chicago were practically hockey ghost towns as little as five years ago (or two years ago in Chicago’s case) mean anything?
On the flip side, does it matter that Toronto and Montreal are the two most rabid hockey cities in the world, and that no city in America, as much as it may hurt to admit it, will ever reach that level of hockey heaven?
Discuss it in the comments, of course.
