A generational matchup of Caitlin Clark and Diana Taurasi delivered another historic audience for the WNBA.
Sunday’s Fever-Mercury WNBA regular season game averaged 1.93 million viewers on ESPN, marking the fourth-largest WNBA audience since Memorial Day 2001. The top four have come this season alone, all for games involving Caitlin Clark and the Fever.
Indiana’s win was the most-watched WNBA game to ever involve Phoenix great Diana Taurasi. Her previous most-watched WNBA game was her career debut against Connecticut in May 2004 (1.43M). (Taurasi has played in front of larger audiences since, but only during the Olympics.)
Fever-Mercury was the tenth WNBA game this season to average at least one million viewers. The league entered this season having gone nearly 16 years without a single seven-figure audience. The ten games with one million viewers is the most in a single WNBA season since the league’s final year with NBC in 2002 (12).
As one would expect, nine of the ten games to top the million viewer mark have involved Clark and the Fever. The exception was Sparks-Aces on May 18, which had a direct lead-in from the Fever against New York. (One other non-Clark game finished just shy of the million viewer mark, Liberty-Aces earlier this month at 996,000.)
Most-watched WNBA games this season
It bears noting that despite all of the viewership marks set by Clark and the Fever this season, none of the games have yet to rank among the ten most-watched WNBA games all-time, a list that still consists exclusively of games on NBC from 1997-2002.
Fever-Mercury was the second half of a WNBA doubleheader that opened with Dream-Liberty at 586,000.
