The financial magazine Forbes occasionally ranks sports teams, either in individual sports or combined, by various economic data. Today, they came out with a ranking of all 30 NHL teams -- which, if you want to see all 30 of them, you will have to click 30 times, because they have them all on separate pages, presumably to increase page views. (Here's the complete list.) The Deep Dish has saved you the trouble of searching for the Blackhawks; they rank seventh with a valuation of $300 million, which is just behind the Flyers at $301 million, the Bruins at $302 million and the Red Wings at $305 million.
↵↵Above that are the top-ranked Toronto Maple Leafs ($505 million), the New York Rangers, second-ranked at $461 million, and the Montreal Canadiens, third at $408 million.
↵↵That's a peculiar ranking, and the NHL is a peculiar league because of its Canadian origin and 24 of the 30 teams US-based, including several in warm-weather cities where it really doesn't belong. The Maple Leafs, in the biggest city in Canada and owned by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (thus the name of the SB Nation Leafs blog Pension Plan Puppets), haven't won a Stanley Cup in 43 years and rarely are contenders... yet they make money because Toronto is hockey-mad. Same for the Canadiens, who used to dominate the league but who have won only two Cups since 1979, the last in 1993, and the Rangers, who have one Cup since 1940 (in 1994).
↵↵That makes the Blackhawks one of the franchises on the rise, and they could easily have been as high as fourth. Check out the link above to see how Forbes arrived at the numbers.
↵↵The bottom-ranked team is, not surprisingly, the Phoenix Coyotes at $134 million, ranked by Forbes as worth less than the league paid for them in 2009.