St. Louis is a top five hockey town

While we’re watching the Cardinals stumble through whatever the hell is wrong with them this season, it’s nice to be reminded that there’s another team in town. Sure, it’s also another team that can be more than a little frustrating at times, but we love them nonetheless.

And we love them so much that WalletHub’s annual listing of American cities has ranked St. Louis as the NHL’s number five hockey town, behind Detroit, Boston, PIttsburgh, and Anaheim (!). How is this determined?

We evaluated each divisional category using 19 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. 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.

We 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.

The Blues ranked second in performance (regular season, obviously), fourth for attendance, sixth for stadium capacity, and seventh for fan engagement.

What does all of this mean?

Blues fans show up, are excited and engaged about this team (obviously “engaged” can mean so many things. So many things), and probably that the loss of the Rams is a boon for the Blues.

Keep on keepin’ on, Blues fans. Perhaps eventually our loyalty’ll be rewarded in the postseason one day.