Caitlin Clark and the Fever continue to rank as the biggest viewership draw in the WNBA, posting another one of the season’s top audiences last weekend.
Saturday’s Fever-Dream WNBA regular season game averaged 1.7 million viewers on ABC, marking the third-largest audience of the season behind Fever-Liberty on CBS earlier this month (2.6M) and Wings-Fever on the opening weekend of the season (2.5M).
Going back further, Atlanta’s win ranks as the seventh-most watched regular season WNBA game on ABC, which began carrying games in 2003. (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 combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes will generally skew historical comparisons, particularly to years prior to 2020.)
As one might expect given the game aired on broadcast television, viewership outpaced the two previous meetings between Clark and Angel Reese of the Dream, both of which aired on Prime Video earlier this month (816K; 686K). Last year’s lone game between Clark and Reese — then of the Sky — averaged 2.70 million viewers on ABC the opening Saturday of the season.
The Storm-Mercury lead-out averaged 1.1 million.
On Monday night, Mercury-Fever averaged 941,000 on USA Network — trailing only Fever-Tempo on the same network earlier this month (1.00M) as the most-watched game on cable or streaming this season. The same two teams met again on the same network Wednesday night, figures for which were not immediately available.
In other action, CBS averaged 1.32 million for Sky-Wings on Saturday night — a rebound from the previous week’s 872,000 for Lynx-Aces opposite the clinching game of the NBA Finals. The network also drew 1.02 million for Valkyries-Aces on Sunday.
On ESPN Sunday night, Liberty-Sparks averaged 778,000 in the premiere of ESPN’s “Women’s Sports Sundays” programming block. Liberty-Aces drew 394,000 on USA two nights later.
