Bloomberg: Capitals “Smartest Spenders” Among Washington Sports Teams

Last week, the Capitals were voted as having the worst uniforms in Washington. Thursday, they were considered the "smartest spenders" in the area, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

I'm horrible at anything business-related (hence why I became a journalist), so here is how the rankings were tabulated:

Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Ira Boudway compiled the list using regular and post-season records, and publicly available payroll data, to calculate how much teams spent per win over the last five seasons. (For baseball, he also included the first half of the current season.) Every team was then compared against league average to see how well they turn wages into wins, producing a total score cal led the “efficiency index.” The lower the index the better.

The Caps' "efficiency index" of -1.1014 was the 15th-lowest number, which means that they are the 15th-smartest spenders in all of North American professional sports (the Tampa Bay Rays came out on top with an index of -1.8198) and seventh-smartest among NHL teams.

Meanwhile, the Nationals sat at No. 53 out of 122 with an index of -0.3189, followed by the Redskins at 102 (1.0012) and the Wizards at 106 (1.1475).

Personally, I thought it was interesting that Ted Leonsis owns one of the smartest and one of the dumbest(?) franchises in terms of spending.

Other than that, I still have no idea what any of this means.


Follow Adam on Twitter @AdamVingan and e-mail your story ideas to adamvingan (at) gmail.com.

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