The anticipation for the first Knicks home Finals game in 27 years extended well beyond the city of New York.
Monday’s Spurs-Knicks NBA Finals Game 3 averaged 23.79 million viewers across the traditional broadcast on ABC and an alternate presentation on ESPN, marking the largest NBA audience of any kind since the clinching Game 5 of the 2017 Warriors-Cavaliers NBA Finals (24.53M).
The Spurs’ win, which peaked with 26.3 million in the 11:15 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the seventh-largest NBA audience since the end of the Michael Jordan-led Bulls era of the 1990s, and the sixth-largest since ABC resumed carrying games in the 2002-03 season.
(Note that Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, only began doing so in 100 percent of markets a year ago, and is months into a new methodology that integrates its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes will skew historical comparisons, particularly to years before 2020.)
Most-watched NBA games since 1998
Viewership was also the highest for a Game 3 in the NBA Finals since Jazz-Bulls on NBC in 1998, a 42-point rout that nonetheless drew 25.70 million. The previous high over that span was 20.27 million for Lakers-Sixers on NBC in 2001. Compared to last year’s Game 3 audience of 9.19 million for Thunder-Pacers — the least-watched Game 3 of the Nielsen people-meter era, save for the 2020 “bubble” — this year’s figure increased 159%.
Beyond the NBA, Game 3 ranks as the most-watched basketball game of any kind — college, pro, men’s, women’s, domestic or international — since the 2017 NBA Finals. The previous high was 20.3 million for the 2024 United States-France Olympic men’s basketball final on NBC (per Nielsen and Adobe Analytics), and the previous high for a domestic basketball game was 18.89 million for the South Carolina-Iowa NCAA women’s basketball national championship that same year.
Outside of football and the Olympics, only one sporting event has averaged a larger audience since the COVID hiatus six years ago, Game 7 of last year’s Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series (27.33M). Even the most recent men’s World Cup Final had a smaller audience — at least officially — with 22.32 million.
The Knicks-Spurs NBA Finals is now averaging 19.1 million viewers through three games, the highest since Warriors-Cavaliers in 2017 (19.5M) and the second-highest in the past 25 years.
