While nowhere close to the heights of a Caitlin Clark game, the WNBA nonetheless continues to see increased viewership as the postseason rolls on.
Sunday’s Aces-Liberty WNBA semifinal Game 1 averaged 929,000 viewers on ABC, up 27% from Game 1 of last year’s WNBA Finals between the same two teams, which aired in the same Sunday ABC timeslot (729K). New York’s win, which peaked with 1.2 million viewers, outdrew all four games of last year’s Finals — the most-watched of which was Game 4 at 889,000 viewers.
Viewership soared 60% over last year’s semifinal game on ABC (Liberty-Sun Game 4: 579K) to rank as the highest for the round in 22 years — since NBC drew 1.35 million for Starzz-Sparks Game 2 in what was then-known as the Western Conference Finals.
As one would expect, viewership was about half of what Clark and the Fever drew in the same window against Connecticut the prior week (1.84M).
Later in the day, Game 1 of the Sun-Lynx series averaged 654,000 viewers on ESPN — the largest semifinal audience on cable since 2000. Viewership outpaced the previous week’s first round openers on ESPN, none of which hit the 500,000 mark.
In the prolonged culture war over Caitlin Clark, there has been a tug of war between those who would downplay the impact of the Fever rookie and those who argue that the WNBA is nothing without her. It would seem clear from the data that Clark is far and away the biggest driver of WNBA viewership, commanding audiences far in excess of any other team or player, but that the rest of the league is also growing in popularity.
It is also fairly likely that those factors are not unrelated. While both pro and anti-Clark figures have suggested that her fanbase will tune out entirely with the Fever eliminated, it would seem likely that at least some of the viewers who began watching WNBA games this season will continue doing so to the end.
