Caitlin Clark’s second season may be an even bigger draw than the first, judging by the viewership for the Fever’s opener against the Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky.
Saturday’s Sky-Fever WNBA regular season game averaged 2.7 million viewers on ABC, marking the largest WNBA regular season audience since Memorial Day 2000 and the league’s second-largest audience of any kind over that span — trailing only last year’s WNBA All-Star Game (3.44M).
Indiana’s blowout win, which peaked with 3.1 million viewers, topped all four meetings of the Sky and Fever last season — the most-watched of which was a late June matchup on ESPN that drew 2.3 million.
Compared to Fever-Liberty on ABC the opening Saturday of last season — Clark’s third career game — viewership increased more than 50 percent from 1.71 million.
To put the number in perspective, it is just shy of the 2.8 million ABC averaged for its NBA Saturday Primetime package during the regular season and surpasses every Major League Baseball game so far this season — including an unusually strong Mets-Yankees game Sunday night that averaged 2.54 million on ESPN.
Earlier in the day, Aces-Liberty averaged 1.3 million, peaking at 1.9 million. The two games were the 35th and 36th WNBA telecasts to top the million viewer mark dating back to last year’s draft, in which Clark was selected #1.
Prior to Clark being drafted, no WNBA telecast had hit the million viewer mark since 2008.
In other opening weekend action, Friday’s Opening Night doubleheader averaged 612,000 viewers on ION — more-than-doubling the comparable night last year (which was not Opening Night).
In the early window, regional coverage featuring Lynx-Wings — Paige Bueckers’ WNBA debut — averaged 639,000. The late window, pitting the Sparks against the expansion Valkyries in their inaugural game, averaged 581,000. For more WNBA ratings, including Dream-Fever on NBA TV Tuesday night, see the SMW Sports Ratings Tracker.
