The WNBA Finals finished with its largest audience in 25 years for New York’s overtime win over Minnesota.
Sunday’s Lynx-Liberty WNBA Finals Game 5 averaged a 1.1 rating and 2.15 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest audience for a Finals game since the winner-take-all Liberty-Comets Game 3 on NBC in 1999 (3.25M) and the fourth-largest ever for the title series, behind only the 1999 game, Game 2 of the 1998 series (Mercury-Comets: 2.26M) and the single-elimination 1997 final (Liberty-Comets: 2.85M). All of those games aired on NBC.
The 1.1 rating is the highest for a Finals game since the clinching Liberty-Comets Game 2 in 2000 (1.6) and the fifth-highest overall.
New York’s overtime win more-than-doubled the previous high for a Game 5 of the WNBA Finals, 913,000 viewers for Sparks-Lynx in 2017. No other Finals Game 5 has drawn even 700,000, with Fever-Mercury in 2009 ranking third with 658,000. Compared to the previous Finals Game 5 in 2019, Sun-Mystics on ESPN2 opposite NFL coverage, this year’s audience increased nearly five-fold from 449,000.
Game 5 delivered the largest WNBA audience ever on an NFL Sunday, surpassing the previous high of 1.84 million for Fever-Sun on ABC in the first round of this year’s playoffs, which marked the playoff debut of Caitlin Clark.
It delivered the seventh-largest audience of the WNBA season — sixth excluding the WNBA Draft — and was the eighth game to top the two million viewer mark. It outdrew the season-opening Fever-Sun game that marked the career debut of Caitlin Clark, which aired on ESPN2 (2.12M). The only telecasts to draw a larger audience this year all involved Clark: four Fever games, the WNBA Draft and WNBA All-Star Game.
Overall, 32 WNBA windows crossed the million-viewer threshold during the 2024 season — 31 excluding the draft — more-than-doubling the previous single-season record of 15 in 1998. Game 5 was the seventh of those games that did not feature or follow Clark and the Fever, all five games of the Finals joining an Aces-Sky game on CBS in August (1.22M) and a Mercury-Sun game on ABC in June (1.02M).
Prior to this season, not a single WNBA telecast had topped the million-viewer mark since 2008. (The previously-mentioned Game 5 of the 2017 Finals would likely have done so had Nielsen included out-of-home viewing in its estimates at the time.)
The complete, five-game Liberty-Lynx WNBA Finals averaged a 0.8 rating and 1.57 million viewers across ESPN and ABC, marking the highest rated series since the two-game Comets-Liberty in 2000 (1.2) and the most-watched since the three-game Comets-Liberty in 1999 (2.02M).
