This Final Four Is The Modern NHL's Sun Belt Dream

Rejoice, Gary Bettman — 2023 is peak warm-weather hockey.

For obvious reasons — ice, anyone? — hockey is primarily known as a northern, wintry sport. And for the majority of its history, the structure of the NHL has reflected that. Prior to the additions of the expansion San Jose Sharks and Tampa Bay Lightning in 1992 and 1993, no team was further south than the Los Angeles Kings, and only three teams — the Kings (latitude: 34.1 degrees north), St. Louis Blues (38.6) and Washington Capitals (38.9) were situated below the 40th parallel (or roughly the Mason-Dixon line, if you prefer). By contrast, the league had more than twice that many teams — seven — located in Canada.

But hockey’s grand projects of expansion and relocation during the 1990s and beyond have mainly involved moving one of the coldest sports further south. By 2023, nearly half of the league’s teams are south of the 40th parallel, a group that includes 10 of the 14 new cities added to the NHL’s ranks since 1991. And now the path to the Stanley Cup leads directly through those towns: Each of the past five champions resides below the 40th parallel, and a sixth is guaranteed this season. In fact, the 2023 playoffs are the clearest actualization of the league’s Sun Belt plans yet.

With a Final Four made up of teams hailing from Las Vegas, NV (36.2 latitude), Raleigh, NC (35.8), Dallas, TX (32.8) and Sunrise, FL (26.2), this is the first time in modern NHL history — i.e., since the playoffs assumed their familiar bracket structure in 1980 — that every semifinal entrant hailed from a city south of the 40th parallel. The average latitude for that group (32.8 degrees) also surpasses 2020 for the southernmost of any NHL Final Four since 1980:

This is merely the apotheosis of a long-running trend. Back in 2014, my old FiveThirtyEight colleagues Nate Silver and Ritchie King calculated the geographic “center of gravity” for the Stanley Cup each year of its existence, based on where the average historical winner had been based to that point. After mainly drifting westward through Canada during the 1980s, the Cup began a sharp southern turn starting in 1991 and has hardly looked back since.

With Canadian teams struggling to win the Cup and almost all of the league’s new additions coming in places like Florida, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Tennessee, it’s probably not surprising that the iciest sport’s championship road has thawed a lot in recent decades. But that doesn’t make it any less weird, in a sense, to end up with a Final Four based quite so far to the south.

Yes, Carolina, Vegas, Dallas and even Florida (for all my doubts about them this season) would each make a worthy champion. Their collective success, however, is a reminder of just how much the NHL prioritized Sun Belt growth over the previous three-plus decades — and how, shockingly, that area is now much more entrenched as the sport’s center of success than its counterpart to the Canadian north.

Filed under: NHL