Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever are setting viewership records almost every time they take the floor, the latest coming Wednesday night.
Wednesday’s Mystics-Fever WNBA regular season game averaged 460,000 viewers on NBA TV, marking the largest WNBA audience ever on the network, which became Nielsen-rated in 2010. Indiana’s win, which peaked with 566,000 viewers in the 8:30 PM ET quarter-hour, surpassed the previous high of 430,000 set by Fever-Liberty earlier this month.
NBA TV has now scored its largest audience on four separate occasions this season, all involving the Clark-led Fever. The Fever’s five appearances on the network this season rank as its five most-watched WNBA games. Entering this season, the largest WNBA audience on NBA TV was 210,000 for a 2014 Lynx-Mercury winner-take-all playoff game to determine who would advance to the WNBA Finals, a figure that has been surpassed six times this year (including by Liberty-Sky on June 4).
Every network that carries the WNBA has set at least one viewership record this season, with a total of 11 games hitting network highs. All-but-one of those records was set by a Clark game, the exception being Liberty-Lynx at CBS record 704,000 on May 25 — a mark that has since been broken by the Fever against the Sky last weekend (2.25M).
WNBA viewership records by network this season
To put it another way, ten of the 16 Fever games this season has set a network viewership record. Of the six exceptions, four were not carried on a Nielsen-measured platform. Thus ten of 12 Fever games on Nielsen rated TV have set a viewership record, the exceptions being a June 10 matchup with the Sun on NBA TV and Indiana’s first meeting with Chicago on ESPN June 1.
Later Wednesday night, Storm-Aces averaged 179,000 viewers.
So far this season, WNBA games on NBA TV are averaging 241,000 viewers — up 346% from the same point last season (54K). NBA TV finished last season averaging 46,000 viewers across 47 games, which was a four-year-high at the time.
