The Rangers' top 10 nearest neighbors contain no other NHL teams — or any hockey entity at all — yet the set scores in a tight band from 0.97 down to 0.92, the hallmark of a flat shape with no single dominant pull.
What fills that band is a distinctly New York sports-media cluster. Mets Booth leads at 0.97, followed by the New York Mets at 0.96 and athlete Noah Syndergaard at 0.95. The Kay Show on YES (0.94) and Newsday (0.93) round out the top five. Across all ten neighbors, the subcategory breakdown is: three Sports Teams (New York Mets, New York Jets, New York Giants), three Athletes (Noah Syndergaard, CC Sabathia, Curtis Granderson), two Podcasts and Radio (Mets Booth, Morning Show with Boomer & Gio), and two News Publishers (Newsday, New York Post Sports). The athletes and teams are predominantly baseball and football properties — cross-sport New York fandom, not hockey-specific audiences. The media outlets reinforce that: sports talk radio and tabloid sports coverage, not hockey beats.
The Rangers' audience shape is defined less by the sport they play than by the broader New York sports-media ecosystem they inhabit.