The WNBA scored two of its three largest regular season audiences in the past nine years with Saturday’s opening weekend ABC doubleheader.
Saturday’s Sky-Mystics WNBA regular season game averaged a 0.39 rating and 611,000 viewers on ABC, marking the league’s largest regular season audience in nine years — since Lynx-Mercury on the opening weekend of the 2012 season, also on ABC (804K). The previous high was 599,000 for a Wings-Mercury game on ABC last summer.
Chicago’s win, which marked the Sky debut of F Candace Parker, ranks as the most-watched WNBA game of any kind since the 2018 All-Star Game (709K) and topped every WNBA Finals game since Game 5 of the 2017 series (902K). Last year’s top Finals game, Seattle’s clinching Game 3 win over Las Vegas, averaged 570,000 on ESPN.
Later in the day, a rematch of that Storm-Aces final averaged a 0.39 and 598,000 on ABC — the league’s third-largest regular season audience since 2012. The average of 605,000 for Saturday’s doubleheader surpassed last year’s opening weekend games by 25%. Last year’s opening weekend took place in late July and included Sparks-Mercury (540K) and Sky-Aces (432K) on ABC.
Saturday marked just the second WNBA doubleheader ever on ABC, which has been carrying games since 2003.
In the weekend’s only other WNBA game on Nielsen-measured TV, Fever-Liberty chipped in just 81,000 on NBA TV Friday night. CBS Sports Network, which carries several WNBA games, is not Nielsen-rated.
[Some Nielsen estimates from ESPN PR 5.18]
