Monday (5/20) sports ratings: Sans-NBA, Oilers-Canucks tops night

On a rare off night for the NBA Playoffs, an all-Canadian Stanley Cup Game 7 topped the sports viewership charts for Monday, May 20.

Monday’s Oilers-Canucks second round Stanley Cup playoff Game 7 averaged 1.66 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest audience on record for an all-Canadian NHL game and the top sports audience of the day. The Oilers’ win declined 40% from Kraken-Stars Game 7 in the same window last year (2.75M).

For more on the NHL figures, including the average viewership for the first two rounds of the playoffs, see this article.

The NHL game had a direct lead-in from a WNBA game featuring Caitlin Clark. Sun-Fever averaged 1.56 million viewers on ESPN, the third-largest WNBA audience in the past 22 years and second-largest ever on cable. It was the fourth WNBA game to hit the million viewer mark in just one week of play this season, after the league had gone nearly 16 years without a single seven-figure audience.

For more on the WNBA numbers, see this link.

Further down the dial, FS1 averaged 327,000 for a Tigers-Royals Major League Baseball game, followed by Diamondbacks-Dodgers on MLB Network at 198,000. MLB Network also drew 141,000 for a Padres-Braves matinee leading into abbreviated coverage of White Sox-Blue Jays at 158,000.