For the second-straight week, a nationally televised matchup of Caitlin Clark’s Fever and Angel Reese’s Sky delivered the top WNBA audience in 23 years.
Sunday’s Fever-Sky WNBA regular season game, the third meeting of the season between Indiana’s Caitlin Clark and Chicago’s Angel Reese, averaged 2.30 million viewers on ESPN — surpassing the teams’ meeting on CBS the prior week (2.25M) as the most-watched WNBA game since Memorial Day 2001.
The three most-watched WNBA games since 2001 have come just in the first six weeks this season, two being matchups of Clark and Reese and the third being Clark’s debut against Connecticut on Opening Night.
Chicago’s win was also the most-watched WNBA telecast ever on ESPN. To put the numbers in perspective, ESPN had only three audiences as large during the NBA regular season — its season-opening pairing of Mavericks-Spurs (2.99M) and Celtics-Knicks (2.55M), plus Bucks-Knicks on Christmas Day (2.49M). (TNT and ABC had several more games with larger audiences.)
After the WNBA went nearly sixteen years without a single seven-figure audience, there have already been nine games this season to surpass the million viewer mark.
Eight of the nine have involved Clark and the Fever, including Friday’s Fever-Dream game on ION — which averaged 1.18 million, the largest WNBA audience ever on the Scripps-owned “netlet” that began airing games last season. The previous high was 1.02 million for Fever-Mystics earlier this month, and the high before that was 742,000 for Fever-Sparks in May.
Indiana’s games against Atlanta and Chicago were their 11th and 12th this season to set a viewership record on their respective network. In total, 13 WNBA games this season have set a viewership record, with Liberty-Lynx in May setting a mark on CBS that was later broken by a Sky-Fever matchup.
Fever-Dream was the first half of an ION doubleheader that concluded with Sun-Aces at 691,000 viewers — the largest audience for a WNBA game on the network that did not involve Clark.
WNBA games to set network viewership records this season
