This year’s NBA Finals ratings have been nothing if not consistent.
Wednesday’s Warriors-Celtics NBA Finals Game 3 averaged a 6.2 rating and 11.52 million viewers on ABC, up 32% in ratings and 25% in viewership from Suns-Bucks on a Sunday night in July last year, but down 21% and 14% respectively from Raptors-Warriors in 2019, the previous Finals to take place in the month of June (7.8, 13.35M).
The Celtics’ win, which peaked with 13.25 million viewers at 11:15 PM ET, tops only the past two years as the least-watched Game 3 of the Finals since 2007 (Spurs-Cavaliers: 9.49M) and the lowest rated in at least 35 years, falling below that 2007 series (6.4).
The first three games of the Finals have averaged 11.78 million viewers on ABC (including an ESPN2 simulcast of Game 1), up 28% from last year but the lowest outside of the past two years since 2007. In the past 25 years, only five Finals have averaged a smaller audience through the first three games — the out-of-season Finals of the past two years and three series involving the ratings poison mid-2000s Spurs.
If low historically, the games have delivered the second, third and fourth-largest NBA audiences since the league returned from hiatus nearly two years ago. Last year’s Suns-Bucks Game 6 still holds the top spot at a 6.6 and 12.52 million (pending upward revision). Including college, the games rank as the seventh, eighth and tenth most-watched basketball games over that span.
Like the first two games, Game 3 outdrew the corresponding game of last year’s World Series — if only barely. Astros-Braves Game 3 turned in a 6.1 and 11.47 million (pending upward revision) on FOX last October. The NBA had a substantially larger advantage in the key demographics.
Speaking of, Game 3 averaged a 3.65 rating in adults 18-49, a 2.9 in 18-34 and a 4.2 in 25-54. As one would expect, each game of the series has topped only the past two years as the lowest rated in those demographics in more than a decade. Wednesday’s 3.65 in 18-49 is the lowest Game 3 rating in the demo since at least 2000 (and likely further back).
In the current era, those historic lows make the NBA Finals one of the strongest draws in all of television; excluding football, the first three games rank fourth, sixth and and seventh for the year in 18-49 (and fourth, fifth and sixth in 18-34).
[Nielsen estimates from Programming Insider 6.9, network PR]
