If there was any question whether the Caitlin Clark effect would continue into her WNBA career, they may have been answered Monday night.
The 2024 WNBA Draft, in which Clark was picked first overall by the Indiana Fever, averaged 2.45 million viewers on ESPN — the largest WNBA audience of any kind since 2000, when a Memorial Day Liberty-Comets game averaged 2.74 million on NBC.
No other WNBA telecast, including the playoffs and finals, has managed even one million viewers since 2008. The top telecast over that span was the deciding Game 5 of the 2017 WNBA Finals between the Sparks and Lynx at 913,000.
Viewership increased more-than-fourfold over last year’s draft, which averaged 572,000 on ESPN. The previous record for the draft was 601,000 in 2004, when Diana Taurasi was picked first overall.
While Monday’s audience was the largest for any WNBA event in nearly 24 years, it remains well below the all-time record for the league. The inaugural game in 1997 — Liberty-Sparks on NBC — averaged 5.04 million, and the league regularly attracted seven figure audiences during the NBC era of 1997-2002.
Compared to other draft telecasts, the WNBA edition still trailed last year’s NBA Draft on ABC and ESPN, in which Victor Wembanyama was selected first overall (3.74M), to say nothing of the NFL Draft at a three-day average of 6.0 million across ABC, ESPN and NFL Network. It did outdraw the record-setting first round of last year’s NHL Draft on ESPN, in which Connor Bedard was picked first (681K), and the first round last year’s MLB Draft on ESPN and MLB Network (744K).
Few athletes in recent memory have had as big an impact on the ratings as Clark. Her final collegiate game earlier this month, a loss in the national championship to South Carolina, averaged nearly 19 million viewers to become the most-watched basketball game — men or women’s, college or pro — in five years. It was her third-straight game to set the all-time record for women’s college basketball, coming off of 14.4 million for Iowa’s national semifinal against UConn and 12.3 million for the team’s regional final against LSU.
While Clark is not the sole draw in her draft class, her impact on the ratings has been outsized. The NCAA women’s basketball tournament averaged 2.05 million viewers per game on the ESPN family of networks (2.18 million excluding the “First Four”) — more-than-doubling last year and the highest since ESPN began carrying the event exclusively in 1996. While viewership for non-Iowa games increased a massive 76% from 613,000 last year to 1.06 million, Iowa games shot up nearly threefold — 171% — from 3.78 to 10.24 million.
