Even in a blowout, the start of Brittney Griner’s WNBA career hit a multi-year viewership high on ESPN2.
Monday’s Sky/Mercury WNBA regular season game drew 455,000 viewers on ESPN2, the largest audience for a regular season game on the network since Mercury/Liberty in July 2004 (487K). The 2004 game featured another much-hyped WNBA rookie — Diana Taurasi.
Sky/Mercury outdrew all three WNBA Finals games on ESPN2 last season (a fourth game on ESPN drew 778,000 viewers).
Keep in mind Sky/Mercury was a lopsided blowout in which Griner missed the entire second quarter due to foul trouble. The ESPN2 telecast of the game was delayed by nearly 40 minutes due to overtime in the early Mystics/Shock game.
Despite the multi-year high, Griner’s WNBA debut does not compare favorably to other high-profile rookies. In 2008, Candace Parker‘s first game — against the Mercury — earned 1.1 million viewers on broadcast network ABC.
In 2004, Taurasi’s debut game against the Connecticut Sun drew 1.4 million on ABC.
One imagines that if Griner’s first game had aired on broadcast television, it would have come closer to those previous debuts.
In other WNBA action Monday, the previously mentioned Mystics/Shock game scored 314,000 viewers. Overall, ESPN2 averaged 366,000 viewers for the Memorial Day doubleheader.
To put the numbers in perspective, ESPN2 earned 221,000 viewers for its Major League Soccer season opener in March and NBC Sports Network drew 388,000 for its first IndyCar race of the season the same month.
(Monday’s numbers from ESPN)
