Facing its toughest competition yet, the WNBA Finals viewership held up about as well as one could expect Monday night.
Monday’s Dream-Valkyries WNBA Finals Game 5 averaged 1.4 million viewers, combining a Nielsen-estimated linear audience on USA Network and CNBC with a Peacock streaming audience measured by Adobe Analytics — down from the previous Game 5 two years ago, a winner-take-all Lynx-Liberty game on ESPN under the old best-of-five format (2.15M).
Golden State’s win topped all other Game 5s in WNBA Finals history, all of which were winner-take-all games. Prior to 2024, the high-water mark for a Game 5 was 913,000 for Sparks-Lynx in 2017, with none of the others scratching the 700,000 mark.
(Historical comparisons come with the usual caveats regarding changes in Nielsen methodology — its inclusion of out-of-home viewing, shift to “Big Data + Panel” and now enhanced tracking of co-viewing — but viewership is so much higher than in almost all past years that methodology is less likely to play a meaningful role than in other sports.)
This year’s Finals is the second since the event expanded to a best-of-seven format. The first best-of-seven series, last year’s Aces-Mercury, ended in a four-game sweep.
Game 5 averaged the second-smallest audience of the series, ahead of only Game 2 the previous week (1.3M). Not coincidentally, those are also the two games that aired opposite the NFL. Game 5 outperformed Game 2 despite facing considerably tougher competition, including a stronger-performing “Monday Night Football” game — 18.8 million for Cowboys-Eagles, versus 17.9 million for the previous week’s 49ers-Commanders — plus the World Series (8.3M) and NBA regular season. Game 2 faced only the NFL.
Both Games 2 and 5 outperformed last year’s lone Finals game to air opposite the NFL, Mercury-Aces Game 2 in a Sunday afternoon ABC window (1.2M).
Two other games were originally set to air opposite the NFL — specifically “Thursday Night Football” — but were rescheduled in order to ensure the Dream could play in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. Game 3 was shifted from a Thursday to a Wednesday, averaging 1.7 million viewers. Game 6 this past Thursday was shifted from primetime to a 12:30 PM ET start, with figures for that game not available until Monday at the earliest.
While the WNBA has been competing with the NFL for years, Monday marked the first time that a WNBA Finals game has ever aired opposite the World Series. It may also be the last, as under the new collective bargaining agreement, the season could end nearly a month later than under the current schedule — as late as November 21 (November 30 in Summer Olympics years). That would mean the Finals would typically begin after the World Series has concluded.
