Playground →
At 0.99, Darren Dreger is the strongest pull in Bob McKenzie's top 10 — and the two nearest neighbors are both sports journalists, not fellow athletes.
The shape here is two-peak. The first cluster is tight and hockey-specific: Darren Dreger (0.99) and Pierre LeBrun (0.98) sit at the top as journalists, followed closely by The Hockey News (0.96) as a magazine, Hockey Night in Canada (0.96) as a TV show, and TSN Hockey (0.95) as a podcast and radio property. This first peak is a dense band of hockey media — journalists, broadcast, and print — rather than athletes. Paul Bissonnette (0.95) is the only fellow athlete in the top 10, making him the lone same-subcategory neighbor in the set.
The second, lower peak pulls in a noticeably different direction. Hockey Hall of Fame (0.93), NHL (0.92), USA Hockey (0.92), and NHL Network (0.92) form an institutional hockey cluster — sports leagues and broadcast infrastructure — while John Buccigross (0.92) adds a third journalist to the mix. The top 10 contains four journalists, four hockey media or institutional properties, one athlete, and one destination brand. McKenzie is categorized as an athlete, but his audience shape is defined almost entirely by hockey journalism and hockey media consumption — not by the athlete subcategory he occupies.
That gap between category label and audience shape is the structural finding: the audience here behaves like a hockey media readership, not an athlete following.
