Pittsburgh Sports with a Side of Sarcasm

When the Pittsburgh Penguins ended their affiliation with the Wheeling Nailers in August, and the Columbus Blue Jackets swooped in to partner with the Nailers instead, I wondered whether the Blue Jackets would now be infringing on the Penguins’ market. Wheeling sits 46 miles from Pittsburgh in a straight line, about 58 to 60 by car. That is well inside what many would consider Penguins territory.

It turns out there was no line to cross. An affiliation agreement is a player-development contract, not a franchise placement. The franchise has played in Wheeling since 1992 — as the Thunderbirds until 1996 — and it is not going anywhere; all that changed is who provides their players. The Hoffmann family bought controlling interest in the Penguins from Fenway Sports Group in a deal that valued the franchise at $1.7 billion. The Hoffmanns have owned the ECHL’s Florida Everblades since 2019. Naturally, the Penguins changed their ECHL affiliation to the Everblades, meaning Wheeling needed a new partner, and Columbus — 121 miles away in a straight line — made geographic sense. The two-year deal runs through the 2027-28 season.

The question stuck with me anyway, because a similar one had come to mind over the summer. While on vacation in Cape May, New Jersey, I was surprised to find a Philadelphia Flyers event on the lawn at Congress Hall. Cape May is 72 miles from Philadelphia in a straight line, 90 to 95 by car, most of the way down the Jersey shore. So where does one team’s territory end and another’s begin?

The rule is written into the NHL Constitution, and the radius is smaller than you might think. Article 4.1 gives each club “exclusive territorial rights in the city in which it is located and within 50 miles of that city’s corporate limits.” Article 4.3 adds that no franchise may be placed inside another member’s territory without that member’s written consent.

There are three key takeaways from the rule:

1. It is a circle, not a border. There is no dividing line, no split county, no body of water separating one club’s turf from another’s. There is a club’s city plus everything within 50 miles of that city’s outer limits — measured from the corporate limits, not from the arena or downtown, so a physically large city carries a noticeably bigger circle than a compact one. Think Dallas, which sprawls across some 340 square miles, against Pittsburgh’s 55.
2. Most circles touch nothing. For 24 of the 32 clubs, the nearest rival territory is hundreds of miles away. Between them lies open ground that belongs to no one, which is exactly the situation across the middle of Pennsylvania between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
3. Where circles do overlap, the overlap is total. The NHL never carved the shared ground into halves. Two clubs simply hold rights over the same territory, and the newcomer — the Anaheim Ducks, for instance — typically got there by paying a large fee for the established club’s consent.

One more caveat about Wheeling: the circle covers professional hockey generally, not just the NHL. That is why AHL and ECHL placements inside a club’s circle run through the NHL club, and why a team playing 46 miles from PPG Paints Arena is permissible: the Nailers were already there with the Penguins’ blessing, and switching affiliates did not move the team an inch. The NHL Constitution has nothing to say about affiliation.

The NHL’s 50 miles is the tightest radius among the four major leagues. The NFL uses 75 miles in every direction from a city’s exterior corporate limits, and the NBA uses 75 air miles — but with one crucial difference. Where two NBA territories overlap, that league’s constitution says they “shall be evenly divided by a line between the two points of intersection.” Baseball does not use a radius at all; it draws its operating territories county by county. So of the leagues that enforce circular territories, the NHL is the one that leaves the overlap whole.

This is how the Rangers, Islanders, Devils and Flyers are all able to coexist. There is no actual boundary between the teams. The Islanders, for example, play entirely inside the Rangers’ territory. Their home, UBS Arena at Belmont, sits just past the Queens line — barely outside New York City itself, and nowhere near the edge of the Rangers’ circle. The Islanders got there by paying a $6 million franchise fee plus a separate $5 million territorial fee to the Rangers when they joined the NHL in 1972. The Devils did the same thing a decade later, indemnifying the Rangers, Islanders and Flyers to move from Denver to the New Jersey Meadowlands in 1982. All four clubs hold overlapping rights to the same ground.

As for the Penguins and Flyers, their circles never come close to meeting. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are 257 miles apart, so roughly 157 miles of Pennsylvania belongs to neither club. The Penguins reach places as far as Butler, Steubenville, Uniontown and Wheeling. The Flyers reach places as far as Wilmington, Trenton, Reading and Allentown. Places like Altoona, State College, Harrisburg, Scranton and Erie are all unclaimed.

Across the entire league, only three places have overlap:

The New York–Philadelphia corridor. Newark sits 9 miles from Lower Manhattan and Elmont 15, so all three New York-area clubs hold rights over essentially the same ground. Philadelphia’s circle then laps into central New Jersey, catching Trenton and Princeton alongside the others.

The Golden Horseshoe. Toronto and Buffalo are only 59 miles apart across the lake, so the Niagara peninsula falls inside both circles. Hamilton is 37 miles from Toronto and 56 from Buffalo — the reason Jim Balsillie’s repeated attempts to put a team there ran into two objectors rather than one.

Southern California. Anaheim is 24 miles from downtown Los Angeles, well inside the Kings’ circle. Disney’s 1993 expansion fee was $50 million, and half of it went straight to the Kings as compensation for sharing the market.

Back to Cape May. The 50-mile circle is not the only territory the league draws. There is a second system — the television market — that is much larger and far more consequential, and it is measured in Nielsen market areas rather than miles. It decides who can sell local broadcast rights where, and it is the reason some out-of-market packages are subject to blackouts.

Three things can black out a game.

1. You are inside the territory and watching on an out-of-market package, which is enforced by ZIP code and IP address.
2. The league has sold an exclusive national window to ESPN, ABC, TNT or Rogers, in which case no competing feed exists anywhere.
3. It is a non-exclusive night and the local feed supersedes the national one at home.

The television markets themselves are wildly unequal in size. Vancouver’s territory is British Columbia. Detroit’s is Michigan. Dallas holds Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. Boston takes most of New England. Alberta is split between Calgary and Edmonton, western Ontario between Toronto and Winnipeg, and the four clubs of the New York corridor overlap in a shared zone, so you are in-market for every team whose list includes your area.

The television map is where the Penguins and Flyers do have a defined border. SportsNet Pittsburgh carries the Penguins across nearly all of Pennsylvania outside the Philadelphia market, plus almost all of West Virginia, western Maryland, eastern Ohio, the southwestern corner of New York and Ashland, Kentucky — about 2.4 million homes. It even goes out nationally on satellite, blacked out in Columbus to protect the Blue Jackets. The border through eastern Pennsylvania is real, but it exists only for broadcast.

This finally explains the Flyers on the lawn at Congress Hall. Cape May County is one of the eighteen counties in the Philadelphia market. Seventy-two miles puts the town well outside the Flyers’ constitutional circle, but squarely inside their television territory — and it is the television map, not the constitutional circle, that tells a club where its fans actually live.

Radio is more like the Wild West. Club radio networks sign affiliates well outside their own market and reach into other teams’ broadcast territory with no blackout restrictions equivalent to television’s. A team’s radio network is limited only by which stations want their games, not by any defined rule. The exception is streaming, where online audio rights are sold separately and geo-fenced, so a station you can pick up on a car radio three states away may still block you from its online stream.

All 32 NHL territories are listed below.

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To bring things back full circle, the Nailers will keep playing 46 miles from PPG Paints Arena, inside the Penguins’ circle, but now in the colors of a club 121 miles away in Columbus. Nobody had to ask anybody’s permission, because nothing moved. Territory in the NHL governs where you put a team, not who you borrow players from — and the map that decides where a team attracts its fans is a different map entirely, drawn by Nielsen. So, while the Blue Jackets’ affiliate will be playing within the Penguins’ territory, don’t expect to see Blue Jackets events held at Sarris Candies in Canonsburg or Hollywood Casino at The Meadows anytime soon.