With a roster featuring the two most iconic stars of this era — LeBron James and Stephen Curry — the USA men’s basketball team attracted its biggest exhibition audience in 12 years.
Wednesday’s United States-Canada USA Basketball Showcase exhibition game averaged 1.16 million viewers on FS1, marking the largest basketball audience ever on the network — surpassing a Purdue-Indiana men’s college basketball game two years ago (954K) — and the most-watched USA Basketball exhibition since 2012, when the games aired on the ESPN networks and viewership topped out at 2.72 million.
In the intervening years, the exhibition games aired on NBA TV in 2016 and on the now-defunct NBCSN in 2021. None of the games came close to the seven-figure mark in those years.
The Fox networks began carrying USA Basketball ahead of last year’s Basketball World Cup. The top game last summer was a matchup with Spain on the FOX broadcast network (657K).
It should be noted that Wednesday’s game had a direct lead-in from the Colombia-Uruguay Copa America semifinal on FS1.
Viewership slightly outpaced the average NBA regular season audience of 1.09 million, though that figure includes games on NBA TV. With those excluded, the NBA average was 1.56 million. Eleven WNBA games this season have had a larger audience, including Liberty-Fever on CBS this past Sunday (1.87M).
