Playground →
At 0.92, NHL Network is the strongest pull in EA Sports NHL's top 10 — and the second position, NHL at 0.92, sits just a fraction behind it. These two neighbors form a near-tied pair at the top, which is the structural signature of a two-peak shape: the audience bridges two distinct but adjacent clusters rather than collapsing around a single dominant node.
The first cluster is pure hockey infrastructure. NHL Network (0.92), NHL (0.92), Hockey Night in Canada (0.88), and Hockey Hall of Fame (0.88) are a TV channel, a sports league, a TV show, and a destination — four different subcategories, all organized around the same sport. CCM Hockey (0.86) and BAUER Hockey (0.85) extend this into sports equipment brands, and USA Hockey (0.85) adds a second sports league. The second cluster, lower in the ranking, pulls toward broader sports media: The Hockey News (0.86) as a magazine, and TSN Hockey (0.83) as a podcast and radio outlet. No other video game franchise appears anywhere in the top 10 — the audience shape here is defined entirely by hockey consumption across media, equipment, and institutions, not by gaming adjacency.
The one outlier worth noting is Jon Taffer (0.83), a TV personality, whose presence at position 10 is the only neighbor in the top 10 with no hockey-specific identity — a signal that the wider audience shape extends slightly beyond the sport itself.
Taken together, the top 10 describe an audience whose shape is built around deep hockey fandom expressed across multiple formats, with the game franchise sitting at the intersection of that ecosystem rather than at the center of a gaming one.
