Featuring one of the best-known women’s basketball players in Angel Reese, and airing on NBC for the first time in 24 years, the WNBA Finals opened at a viewership high.
Saturday’s Dream-Valkyries WNBA Finals Game 1 averaged a combined 2.1 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics, officially making it the most-watched Game 1 of a Finals series. (If one counts the inaugural, single-elimination Finals in 1997 as a “Game 1,” then this year’s opener ranks second behind 2.85 million for Comets-Liberty.)
Among all Finals games, Game 1 trails only the winner-take-all Lynx-Liberty Game 5 on ESPN in 2024 (2.15M) as the most-watched in the past 25 years.
Note that out-of-home viewing was not included in Nielsen estimates until 2020 or fully accounted for until 2025, that this is only in the second year of a new Nielsen methodology integrating “Big Data” from smart TVs, set-top boxes and first party data with its traditional panel, and that Nielsen has recently tweaked its measurement to better account for co-viewing of games.
Golden State’s win, which peaked with 3.0 million in the 5:45 PM ET quarter-hour, increased 11% from the previous high of 1.9 million set by last year’s Mercury-Aces Game 1 on ESPN. (NBC’s position is that its combined Nielsen + Adobe audience figures are comparable to the Nielsen-only figures of other networks.)
As recently as three years ago, the Liberty-Aces WNBA Finals opened with 729,000 viewers on ABC. Five years ago, the Sky-Mercury Finals opened with 469,000, also on ABC. In 2019, Game 1 of the Sun-Mystics Finals averaged 238,000 on ESPN. Those games all aired on NFL Sundays.
This year’s game avoided NFL competition, but still aired on a competitive college football Saturday that included Alabama-Tennessee on ABC (8.10M) and Penn State-Michigan on CBS (4.50M) in the same mid-afternoon window. Notably, NBC averaged more viewers for the WNBA Finals in that mid-day Saturday slot than the previous weekend, when it carried a Stanford-Notre Dame college football game (1.9M).
Game 1 was the third game this postseason to average at least two million viewers, joining Games 1 and 3 of the Aces-Fever first round series (2.11 and 2.25 million respectively) — tying 1999 as the most in a single playoffs.
Overall, it was the 13th game with more than two million viewers this season — including nine regular season windows and the All-Star Game — and the first of those games that did not feature Fever G Caitlin Clark.
Because the WNBA playoffs coincides with pro and college football, the postseason generally has a lower viewership ceiling than the regular season. The nine most-watched games this year took place in the regular season or over the All-Star break, with only one playoff game — Fever-Aces Game 3 — making the top ten.
Locally, the Bay Area led all markets for Game 1 with a 4.5 rating, followed by New Orleans at a 3.0 and Richmond, Hartford-New Haven and San Antonio each at a 2.1. Atlanta ranked just outside of the top five with a 2.0.
