Recovering almost entirely from its early season struggles, the NBA’s regular season viewership fell only slightly from a year ago.
The 2024-25 NBA regular season averaged 1.53 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and TNT, down two percent from last year, with the year-over-year decline growing to five percent including NBA TV (from 1.09 to 1.04 million).
After some much-scrutinized early season declines in the neighborhood of 20 percent, NBA viewership began to recover with the league’s most-watched Christmas Day slate in five years — which immediately reduced the year-over-year decline from double to single-digits. The Lakers’ midseason trade for Luka Doncic (and Nielsen’s February expansion of out-of-home viewing) were also contributing factors.
Since the trade deadline, games averaged 1.51 million viewers — up 16% from the pre-deadline average, excluding Opening Night and Christmas.
ESPN and ABC combined to average 1.71 million viewers for the regular season, the same as last year, with ABC in particular up 10 percent to 2.68 million. The broadcast network increase helped offset declines on cable, with ESPN and TNT each averaging 1.3 million — both down 7% from last year — and NBA TV 250,000 (-24%).
The league’s top ten games this season were the five Christmas contests, the Opening Night doubleheader, the Bucks-Thunder NBA Cup Final, Lakers-Celtics on March 8 (4.6M) and Lakers-Warriors on January 25 (3.0M). All but the Opening Night doubleheader aired on ABC.
For all of the outsized attention the NBA’s ratings received this season, the league’s slight decline in regular season viewership is within range of the NFL (-2%) and less steep than that of men’s college basketball (-7%), college football (-8%) and the NHL (-13%).
The 2024-25 season was the last under the current NBA media rights deals, which originally went into effect in the 2002-03 season and were renewed in 2007 and 2014. After 23-straight years airing primarily on basic cable, NBA games will primarily air on broadcast television (ABC and NBC) or streaming (Amazon Prime and Peacock) starting next season, with the only cable presence being on ESPN — which will air fewer games in its new deal.
Sunday’s regular season finale, Clippers-Warriors, averaged 1.55 million viewers on ESPN — up 6% from last year’s Lakers-Pelicans finale. For more NBA ratings from the final week of the regular season, see the SMW sports ratings tracker.
