Capping a slow week for the NBA, this year’s Rockets were no match for last year’s Jazz on ABC.
Rockets-Spurs scored a 1.4 rating and 2.30 million viewers on ABC’s NBA Sunday Showcase over the weekend, down 13% in ratings and 9% in viewership from last year (Jazz-Spurs: 1.6, 2.53M). Compared to 2016 (Thunder-Rockets), ratings fell a tick but viewership increased 2% from 2.25 million.
The Spurs’ win was just the fourth ABC game this season to decline from last year. San Antonio has played in three of the four.
Sunday’s game was the third straight on ABC with a rating of 1.5 or lower. The network’s previous 12 games each scored at least a 1.6.
Rockets-Spurs completed a rough week for the NBA, with all eight games on ESPN, ABC and TNT declining from last year.
On ESPN, last Friday’s Pelicans-Cavaliers game had a 1.0 rating and 1.5 million viewers — flat in ratings and down 8% in viewership from last year (Spurs-Thunder: 1.0, 1.6M) and down 17% and 20% respectively from 2016 (Cavs-Hawks: 1.2, 1.9M).
The Clippers-Blazers nightcap had a 0.6 (-53%) and 917,000 (-59%), with the caveat that last year’s matchup pit Houston against Golden State.
Through Sunday, NBA regular season games have averaged 1.933 million viewers across ESPN, ABC and TNT, up 9% from last year (1.78M) and up a fraction of a percent from 2015-16 (1.924M). An earlier version of this post reported that the games were averaging 1.921 million. That average was based on publicly available NBA viewership figures. The 1.933 million figure is from the NBA.
(Why the discrepancy? The publicly available data reported on this site and others is not always the final word from Nielsen. For ESPN programs, Nielsen will later add additional data from OTT, computer and mobile devices. For example, the initial reported figure for the November 22 Warriors-Thunder game was 3.230 million viewers, but that rose to 3.282 million with OTT streaming data included. The NBA and the networks have the updated data, which is not always available to industry sites.)
