Bruins Look to Continue Run of Success for Classic Sports Franchises

(The Wall Street Journal) - No matter what happens in Wednesday night's Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, you can say this about the last six years in sports: It's been a wonderful ride for purists, history buffs, musty old fogies, moss-grown fuddy-duddies, unapologetic curmudgeons and anyone who has spent the last six decades in a Cryogenic tube.

For the fourth consecutive season, one of the teams playing in the Stanley Cup Finals (in this case, the Boston Bruins) is also a member of the "Original Six," the ancient fraternity of hockey franchises that have played continuously in the same city since the dawn of the modern NHL in the early 1940s.

If Boston wins Wednesday's deciding game against the Vancouver Canucks, it will join the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings as the third original-six champion in the last four seasons.

Given that the NHL has 30 active franchises, the raw odds of its six oldest teams pulling off this sort of coup (winning three of four titles) are 2.56 percent.

Hockey is not the only sport where history's ghosts have been forcefully re-animated. In all four major North American team leagues (the NHL, NBA, NFL and MLB) the ancien régime is showing signs of life. There are 10 current major-league baseball franchises that have played continuously in the same city since the beginning of World Series play in 1903: the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox.

In the seven years since 2004, those teams have combined to appear in the World Series nine times and win an astonishing six titles.

The five NFL teams that have played in the same city since 1933 when the NFL Championship Game began (the Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles) have all played in at least one Super Bowl since 2005 and have collected four titles in the last six seasons.

Even in the NBA, where only two teams—the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks—have stayed put since the league's beginnings in 1949, tradition has carried the day. The Celtics won the 2008 NBA title and made it to the Finals last year.

If you are keeping score at home, 11 of the last 22 titles in these four sports have been won by traditional teams. That comes out to a winning rate of 50 percent.

Source: The Wall Street Journal