According to Business Week, the Detroit Red Wings spend their money more effectively than any team in the four major American professional sports leagues except for Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Rays. Here is Business Week's explanation of the rankings:
We’ve used payroll data (from USA Today, Basketball-Reference.com, NBC Sports, and NFL.com) to calculate how much teams spent per win over the last five seasons. (For baseball, we also include the first half of the current season.) We then compared every team against league average, producing a total score we call the efficiency index. The median score for every league is zero. The lower the score, the less a team spent for its wins.
The Red Wings had a -1.4805 "efficiency index" and has averaged 48.4 wins per season over the last five years of data that Business Week evaluated. The Red Wings were followed by the Pittsburgh Penguins in third place. The Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks also made the top 10, giving the NHL four top-10 teams. The NBA, NFL and MLB had two teams each in the top 10.
Out of 122 teams, the Detroit Pistons were 61st overall, the Detroit Tigers were 98th and the Detroit Lions were 111th.
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