The final game of Caitlin Clark’s historic rookie season set yet another WNBA viewership milestone.
Wednesday’s Fever-Sun first round WNBA playoff Game 2 averaged 2.54 million viewers on ESPN, marking the league’s largest audience ever on cable and tenth-largest overall. It is one of only two games this season to rank among the league’s top ten, joining the WNBA All-Star Game on ABC in July (3.44M).
Connecticut’s series-clinching win — which peaked with 3.4 million viewers — trails only the aforementioned All-Star Game as the most-watched WNBA telecast since Memorial Day 2000 (Liberty-Comets: 2.74M) and ranks as the most-watched playoff game since the deciding Game 3 of the 1999 Finals (Liberty-Comets: 3.25M). Those games aired on NBC.
It was the 26th WNBA telecast this season to top the million-viewer mark, with Caitlin Clark having played in 22 (21 Fever games and the WNBA All-Star Game).
Of the four exceptions, two led out of Clark games — including Wednesday’s Mercury-Lynx Game 2. Minnesota’s win averaged 1.22 million, peaking at 2.1 million, trailing only the two Fever-Sun games as the most-watched WNBA playoff game since Game 2 of the 2003 Finals (Sparks-Shock: 1.28M).
This year’s postseason already accounts for the four largest playoff audiences since 2003 — both Fever-Sun games, Mercury-Lynx Game 2 and Tuesday’s Storm-Aces Game 2 (988K). The full first round averaged 1.1 million viewers, the highest average on record for an opening round of the WNBA postseason.
Prior to this season, no WNBA game of any kind had hit the million-viewer mark since Candace Parker‘s career debut in 2008. From 2009-23, the league’s top audience was 913,000 viewers for the deciding Game 5 of the 2017 Finals (Sparks-Lynx) — a figure that has been surpassed 28 times this season.
The most-watched WNBA game all-time remains the first one, Liberty-Sparks on NBC in July 1997. The league’s inaugural game averaged 5.04 million.
Most-watched WNBA games all-time
For Clark, Game 2 marked the end of a historic year on and off the court — fueling a slew of viewership records throughout her senior year at Iowa and into her first year in the WNBA.
