A move up from ESPN2 to ESPN resulted in a historically strong finish for the WNBA Finals.
Wednesday’s Sparks-Lynx WNBA Finals Game 5 had a 0.59 rating and 902,000 viewers on ESPN, up 74% in ratings and 71% in viewership from the same matchup last year (0.34, 528K), which aired on ESPN2. ESPN’s Nielsen ratings now include streaming viewership on television (though not on mobile or desktop devices), while those figures were reported separately in previous years.
Minnesota’s win ranks as the most-watched WNBA game on any network since the 2008 season, the most-watched playoff game since Game 2 of the 2003 Sparks-Shock finals on ABC (1.3M) and the most-watched game on cable since the league’s inaugural All-Star Game on ESPN in 1999 (975K).
Overall, it was the fifth-most watched WNBA playoff game ever on the ESPN family of networks (230 telecasts), with the caveat that playoff and finals games aired on NBC from 1997-02.
For the night, Sparks-Lynx nearly matched competing coverage of the Blues-Penguins NHL Opening Night game on NBCSN. That game had 904,000 viewers with streaming included.
The game delivered a 7.9 rating in Minneapolis-St. Paul, easily the highest in any market. Hartford-New Haven ranked second with a 2.4, followed by New Orleans (1.4), Louisville (1.4) and Birmingham (1.2). Los Angeles was out of the top five, but its 0.9 was still above average.
The full five-game Lynx-Sparks series averaged 559,000 viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, up 15% from last year and the highest average for the WNBA Finals since Mercury-Sky in 2014 (634K). It trails only that 2014 series as the most-watched since Sparks-Shock in 2003 (842K).
[Numbers from ESPN, Programming Insider 10.5]
