Despite the absence of Caitlin Clark, the Fever-Sky rivalry delivered one of ten largest regular season or playoff WNBA audiences in the past two decades on CBS Saturday night.
Saturday’s Fever-Sky WNBA regular season game averaged 1.92 million viewers on CBS, marking the eighth-largest WNBA regular season audience since 2001, and the 10th-largest including the playoffs. (Across all WNBA windows, including the All-Star Game and Draft, it ranks 12th.) Of those games, it was the second-most watched that did not include Clark, behind Game 5 of last year’s WNBA Finals.
Indiana’s blowout win — which peaked with 2.16 million viewers — delivered the third-largest audience of the WNBA season behind the teams’ meeting on ABC the opening Saturday of the season (2.70M) and Fever-Liberty on CBS the following week (2.22M). Clark has not played since that game against the Liberty due to a calf injury.
It also delivered the third-largest WNBA audience ever on CBS, which began airing games in 2020.
The game marked the first time ever that a WNBA regular season or playoff game aired in primetime on broadcast television. ABC carried the WNBA All-Star Game in primetime the past two years, averaging 3.44 million for last year’s exhibition — the largest WNBA audience of any kind since the league’s opening weekend of play in 1997.
CBS is also set to carry the same Fever-Sky matchup in primetime August 9. Given the size of the audience for a lopsided game that did not even feature Clark, it is fair to expect the next primetime meeting to challenge last year’s All-Star Game as the most-watched WNBA telecast since ’97.
For the weekend, Fever-Sky delivered an audience on par with Red Sox-Yankees on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball (1.92M) — though it lost the direct head-to-head with Red Sox-Yankees on FOX (3.0M).
Figures for the other WNBA telecasts on ABC and ION over the weekend will be added when available.
