The Indiana Fever delivered more viewership highs this past week, both with and without Caitlin Clark in the lineup.
Wednesday’s Fever-Sparks WNBA regular season game — which marked Caitlin Clark’s return after a two-week absence — averaged 1.04 million viewers across USA Network and CNBC, the network’s top audience of the season and the league’s largest late night regular season audience on record (start time of 10 PM ET or later).
Four of the six most-watched games on cable or streaming this season have aired on USA Sports, all involving Clark and the Fever.
It was the second-straight Fever game to make the list, as their game against the Aces last Sunday night took the top spot — sans-Clark — with a 0.8 rating and 1.55 million on ESPN’s “Women’s Sports Sundays.” Not only was that the largest audience of the season on cable and streaming, but the fifth-largest across all networks.
Each of the five most-watched games this season have featured the Fever, and while the top three unsurprisingly featured Clark, the other two came during her two-week absence — last Sunday against the Aces and the prior week against the Sparks on CBS (1.57M). That is a continuation of a trend that began during Clark’s injury-wracked sophomore season, when viewership for non-Clark Fever games still comfortably outpaced the rest of the league.
Last Sunday’s audience far surpassed the two previous WNBA games on “Women’s Sports Sundays” — Liberty-Valkyries the previous week (743K) and Liberty-Sparks two weeks ago (778K).
The Fever and Aces have a second-straight Sunday night meeting this coming weekend, but on NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball.”
ESPN and ABC were averaging 1.3 million viewers for WNBA games as of last Sunday, up 6% from the same point last year. Newcomer USA Sports is averaging 512,000 for its games, up 22% from last year’s WNBA average on cable.
In other recent WNBA action, last Saturday’s Valkyries-Dream game on CBS drew 965,000.
