The NBA Cup final was no match for last year, but still neared a season-high.
Tuesday’s Bucks-Thunder NBA Cup Final averaged a 1.75 rating and 2.99 million viewers on ABC, down 29% in ratings and 35% in viewership from last year’s Pacers-Lakers final (2.5, 4.58M), but still the second-largest audience of the NBA season. Knicks-Celtics on Opening Night had 3.01 million.
NBA viewership is notably down this season, but Bucks-Thunder would rank among the top games in most years. It would have tied the seventh-largest audience in all of last season, matching Mavericks-Spurs (Victor Wembanyama’s debut) in the Opening Week.
While the NBA Cup — previously the In-Season Tournament — has been widely derided in its first two years of existence, it is fairly unlikely that a matchup of Milwaukee and Oklahoma City would rank among the most-watched NBA games in any other circumstance. (Then again, it is also unlikely that Milwaukee-Oklahoma City would ever be the only game of the night and air in primetime on broadcast television outside of a Cup scenario.)
Last season, both Bucks-Thunder games aired on NBA TV and averaged under 400,000 viewers. The last time the teams met on ESPN/ABC or TNT was a February 2020 matchup on ESPN that drew 1.12 million.
Milwaukee’s comfortable win was a much healthier draw than the semifinals on Saturday. Rockets-Thunder averaged a 1.1 and 1.89 million on ABC, down 15% and 13% respectively from Pelicans-Lakers on TNT last year (1.3, 2.17M), a decline that seems reasonably modest until one factors in that last year’s game was a 44-point Laker rout that aired opposite the NFL.
One might chalk up the declines to the absence of the Lakers, but Hawks-Bucks on TNT and truTV earlier in the day (1.0M) was down a sharper 37% from Pacers-Bucks last year, which aired in a late afternoon Thursday window on ESPN (1.6M). Though Saturday afternoon is a better window than Thursday rush hour, it featured hefty competition that included the most-watched Army-Navy Game in 35 years.
Ultimately, in an NBA season that is so far down double-digits from last year, it is no surprise that the NBA Cup was largely in keeping with that trend.
Viewership would likely have been down even had the Knicks and Warriors advanced to the final four, but the matchups — featuring smaller market or unknown teams — certainly did not help.
