The folks at WalletHub released their annual “best cities for hockey fans” report this week, which included a new ranking for the Washington D.C. Area.
The Washington D.C. area ranked 15th out the 72 Cities in this year’s report. Below is a listing of the Top 25 cities, as ranked by WalletHub.
This continues a trend of growth and acceptance for hockey in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. In February, Hershey ranked 5th out of 118 cities and towns with NHL, AHL, ECHL, or NCAA Division I men’s hockey teams.
According to a recent Harris Poll of America’s favorite sports, ice hockey today ties with men’s pro basketball as the fifth most followed sport among U.S. adults.
METHODOLOGY
In order to determine the best cities for hockey fans, WalletHub’s analysts compared 72 U.S. cities across two divisional categories, including NHL (Division I Men’s) and NCAA (Division I Men’s). For the sample, they chose cities with at least one college or professional hockey team.
WalletHub evaluated each divisional category using 19 relevant metrics. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for hockey fans. The weight for each divisional category is based on its popularity, which we determined by summing the number of “Likes” for all the teams in each category and calculating the proportion that each league represents in total. WalletHub then calculated the total score for each city based on its weighted average across all metrics and used the resulting scores to construct our final ranking.
You can access the report and entire ranking of the 72 cities here.
By Jon Sorensen
Follow @NoVa_Caps
