Sports Team Naming Strategies in America, 1960-present

I’ve had the vague impression for a while that the naming conventions for American sports teams are not the same as they used to be, so I decided to actually take a look at the data and find out. My hypothesis was that team names used to generally take the form of what I’ll call count names, like the Pittsburgh Steelers (named in 1940), the Philadelphia 76ers (named in 1963), and the Chicago Cubs (named in 1902), but recently they are more likely to be what I’ll call collective names, like the Oklahoma City Thunder (named in 2008), the Tampa Bay Lightning (named in 1992), and the Chicago Fire (named in 1997).