Does Your Favorite Team Suck At Keeping An Efficient Payroll?

Businessweek put together a fun ranking of how all 122 franchises in the four major American professional sports leagues burn their money on player payroll. You might be shocked to find out that most successful teams are intelligent with their spending. The top nine of 10 franchises have been to their league's respective championship game at least once within the last five seasons.

The ranking's sample size used the last five completed seasons, also comparing the means of payroll, regular season wins, and playoff wins against the league average. The efficiency index also factored in playoff wins and championships. Congratulations to the Blackhawks, the most efficient of all (using the default values).

But you want to know who was in last place, right? The Cubs, with an efficiency index of 2.6101. Aw.

The least efficient organization to win a championship in the last five seasons? The Yankees.

See the whole chart here.