Thread: The Most Miserable Sports Cities

The Most Miserable Sports Cities


1) Seattle, the loss of its NBA club was just enough to nudge Seattle past Atlanta, a city with one sports title in 153 cumulative seasons, to the top of the misery list.

2) Atlanta’s postseason misery is legendary, led by the Braves’ failure to take home a world championship in 13 of 14 playoff appearances from 1991 to 2004. Throw in a Falcons loss in their lone Super Bowl appearance (1999) and a pair of losses by the NBA Hawks in the Eastern Conference finals, and Atlanta rides neck-and-neck with Seattle on the disappointment meter.

3) Phoenix, where the 2001 Diamondbacks took the city’s only championship in 92 cumulative seasons

4) Buffalo, where the NFL Bills lost four straight Super Bowls in the 1990s and the NHL Sabres are still looking for their first Stanley Cup

5) San Diego, home to teams that have lost six of seven championship round matchups over the years, the Chargers American Football League crown in 1963 standing as the city’s only championship.

We’re not defining sports misery as sheer futility. The Chicago Cubs going over a century without a championship; the Los Angeles Clippers turning in two winning seasons since 1985–everyone knows about that stuff. We’re going for something else. Sports lore is filled with tales of the near-miss: the Brooklyn Dodgers reaching the World Series six times between 1947 and 1956 only to lose to the Yankees in five of them; the Buffalo Bills losing four straight Super Bowls in the ’90s; the New York Rangers and Atlanta Braves coming close countless times before falling short of a championship. We decided to add it all up and create a sports heartbreak index to identify where fans have been exposed to teams good enough to get their hopes up, only to let them down in the end.

We scored each city on the number of times one of its teams has lost in the postseason, adjusting the misery points to give the most weight to losing in the final round (World Series, Super Bowl, NBA Final, Stanley Cup Final) and doling out progressively fewer points for losing earlier playoff rounds. We also factored in the number of years since each city’s last title (31 for Seattle), and the ratio of each city’s cumulative seasons to championships won (Atlanta, for instance, has compiled 153 MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL seasons while winning one championship, the 1995 Braves). And to keep the playing field even, we limited the contenders to cities with at least 75 cumulative seasons in the four major sports leagues


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