Going from the maximum number of games last year to the minimum this year, the WNBA Finals was unsurprisingly less of a draw.
The four-game Aces-Mercury WNBA Finals averaged 1.5 million viewers across ESPN and ABC, trailing only last year’s five-game Liberty-Lynx series (1.6M) as the most-watched Finals since 2000. (The WNBA expanded its Finals from best-of-five to best-of-seven, meaning this year’s four-game series was a sweep and last year’s went the distance.)
Keep in mind that Nielsen has this year expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets and switched to a new methodology that adds data from set-top boxes and smart TVs to its preexisting panel. The result is that viewership figures will tend to have a built-in advantage over prior years.
Last Friday’s clinching Game 4 averaged 1.4 million on ESPN, down from 1.7 million last year, but surpassing all other Game 4s since the Finals expanded beyond a best-of-three format in 2005. Prior to last year, the high water mark for a Game 4 was 889,000 for Aces-Liberty two years ago.
After opening with 1.9 million viewers in Game 1 — up 62% from last year’s opener and the second-largest Finals audience since 2000 — no subsequent game of the Aces-Mercury series managed to earn as large an audience or surpass last year.
Nonetheless, all four games of the series averaged at least one million viewers, joining last year and 1998 as the only WNBA Finals where all games hit seven figures. Nine-straight Finals games have now topped the million viewer mark, nearly matching all prior years combined (ten). (Though it should be noted that some games from prior years likely would have hit seven figures using current Nielsen methodologies.)
The full WNBA Playoffs averaged 1.2 million viewers on the ESPN networks, up 5% from last year. An increase of that size is modest enough to be fully accounted for by Nielsen methodological changes. But between the shorter Finals and the absence of Caitlin Clark — who played in the most-watched playoff game last season — it is no small feat that viewership was close enough to last year for methodology to matter.
The 5% increase for the playoffs follows a 3% gain for regular season games (not including NBA TV).
This WNBA season was the last under the old NBA media rights deal, which granted ESPN exclusive rights to all playoff games. Under the new rights deal, ESPN will split playoff games with fellow NBA rights partners Amazon and NBCUniversal, plus NBCU spinoff company Versant. That includes the WNBA Finals, which next season is set to air on NBC and Versant-owned USA Network.
