Playground →
The Pittsburgh Penguins' top 10 nearest neighbors split cleanly into two clusters: a Pittsburgh-and-Ohio sports core, and a set of regional consumer brands that have nothing to do with hockey.
The shape is two-peak. The first peak is unmistakably local sports identity. Pittsburgh Pirates leads at 0.99, the strongest pull in the set. Andrew McCutchen follows at 0.96, then a dense band of Steelers-affiliated athletes — Troy Polamalu (0.90), James Harrison (0.89), Ben Roethlisberger (0.89), Ryan Shazier (0.89), and Hines Ward (0.87). Six of the top seven neighbors are athletes, and five of those six are associated with Pittsburgh football rather than hockey. The Penguins' own subcategory — Sports Teams — appears in the top 10 only via the Cleveland Indians at 0.87; no other NHL team appears in the top 10.
The second peak is where the shape gets interesting. Sheetz (social) lands at 0.87 — a regional convenience-store brand sitting inside a cluster otherwise dominated by professional athletes. McNeil (0.87, Miscellaneous) rounds out the ten. These two non-sports entries are not outliers; they score comparably to the lower end of the athlete cluster, signaling a genuine second neighborhood in the audience shape.
Together, the top 10 describe an audience defined less by hockey fandom specifically than by a broader Pittsburgh-and-Ohio regional sports identity, with a secondary pull toward regional consumer brands that serve the same geography.
