Now exclusive to streaming for the first time, the start of the NBA Cup knockout round was no match for the first two years of the tournament.
The NBA Cup quarterfinals averaged 1.09 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video, down 20% from last year on TNT Sports and ESPN (1.36M) and down 21% from the initial year of the in-season tournament two years ago (1.38M).
The decline is in line with other properties making their debut on Prime Video, from NASCAR this year (-16%) to NFL “Thursday Night Football” in 2022 (-28%). But it should be noted that Prime’s NBA package was actually trending up three percent through its Black Friday doubleheader.
As for the individual games, Spurs-Lakers led the way with 1.46 million on Wednesday night — up 10% from Warriors-Rockets in the same window on TNT and truTV last year and the only game of the quarterfinals to post an increase. (Keep in mind that Nielsen methodological changes, specifically its February expansion of out-of-home viewing and September shift to “Big Data + Panel” methodology, could account for some or even all of that gain.)
The Spurs’ win, which peaked with 1.7 million in the 11 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered larger gains in the key young adult demographics — rising 32, 24 and 18 percent respectively among adults 18-34 (310K), 18-49 (731K) and 25-54 (780K). Sports audiences on Prime Video generally skew younger than on linear television.
Wednesday’s game ranks as the third-most watched on Prime thus far, behind the streamer’s Black Friday doubleheader of Knicks-Bucks (2.11M) and Mavericks-Lakers (2.06M).
Earlier in the night, Suns-Thunder averaged 1.05 million — down 28% from Hawks-Knicks on ESPN last year. Oklahoma City’s 49-point win, which peaked with 1.2 million in the 8:15 PM ET quarter-hour, improved their record to 24-1. That ties the 2015-16 Warriors for the best start in NBA history.
On Tuesday night, Knicks-Raptors averaged 1.14 million viewers — down 23% from Mavericks-Thunder on TNT and truTV last year (1.49M). Magic-Heat led in with just 736,000 in an earlier-than-usual 6 PM ET window, down 39% from Magic-Bucks in a later window a year ago (1.2M).
Viewership unsurprisingly paled in comparison to what NBC has been drawing on Tuesday nights this year. The previous week’s “Coast 2 Coast Tuesday” telecast — Knicks-Celtics in most markets and Thunder-Warriors on the West Coast — averaged a Nielsen-measured 1.4 rating and 2.38 million viewers on NBC, with the latter figure rising to 3.2 million including streaming viewership measured by Adobe Analytics. On both a Nielsen-only and combined basis, those were season-highs for the “Coast 2 Coast Tuesday” series.
(In addition to airing on broadcast television, the “Coast 2 Coast Tuesday” series has the advantage of reporting a single combined viewership figure across two games.)
