The debut of NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball” did not tear up the record books, but it did deliver one of the better NBA regular season audiences of recent years.
Sunday’s Lakers-Knicks NBA regular season game — which marked the debut of NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball” — averaged a Nielsen-estimated 2.0 rating and 3.6 million viewers on NBC, with the latter figure rising to 4.5 million including Spanish-language coverage on Telemundo and an Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience on Peacock.
The combined audience is the highest of the NBA season outside of Opening Night and Christmas, and more-than-doubles last year’s equivalent window, Celtics-Sixers on ESPN (a Nielsen-only audience of 1.7 million). (NBC’s position is that because Nielsen does not track its streaming viewership, its combined Nielsen + Adobe audience figures are comparable to the Nielsen-only figures of other networks.)
Compared to the same Lakers-Knicks matchup on the same date last year, which also aired on primetime broadcast television — albeit on a Saturday night — viewership increased sharply from a Nielsen-only 2.5 million on ABC’s “NBA Saturday Primetime.”
The Knicks’ win, which peaked with five million viewers, delivered the largest audience on record for a regular season NBA game that aired fully in Sunday primetime (which begins at 7 PM ET, an hour earlier than on other nights). But that comes with the caveat that it was likely the first such game on broadcast television. Sunday night games on broadcast have been limited to the NBA Finals — and even that took until 1991 — or the occasional conference final Game 7, with regular season games on the night airing sporadically on cable.
The NBA has had larger audiences for Sunday games that bled into primetime, the latest of those being the 5:30-6:30 PM ET games that NBC aired for most of its previous run with the league from 1990-2002.
Overall, it was the most-watched regular season game on a Sunday since Cavaliers-Celtics on ABC in 2018 (4.6M), with the caveat that Nielsen methodological changes — including its inclusion and expansion of out-of-home viewing in its estimates and shift to “Big Data + Panel” methodology — skew comparisons to past years.
Given the hype, production values and teams involved, one might have expected a figure well beyond even the largest NBA audiences of recent years. But it was less than a year ago that ABC drew a larger, Nielsen-only audience of 4.6 million for Lakers-Celtics on a Saturday night last March. And in 2023, the Lakers-Pacers NBA Cup final drew the same 4.6 million, if one considers that to be a ‘regular season’ game.
Nevertheless, it was still the largest sports audience of the weekend — on a Nielsen-only or combined basis — and that is despite facing competition from the Grammy Awards on CBS.
Later Sunday night, NBC averaged a 1.4 and 2.29 million for Thunder-Nuggets, rising to 2.9 million including Telemundo and Peacock — up from a Nielsen-only 1.5 million for Grizzlies-Bucks on ESPN last year. The full doubleheader averaged 3.7 million.
As for the NBA’s other over-the-air primetime package, ABC averaged a Nielsen-only 1.1 and 1.93 million for Mavericks-Rockets on “NBA Saturday Primetime” — down from last year’s previously noted Lakers-Knicks game (2.51M). ESPN drew a 0.8 and 1.51 million for Bucks-Celtics on Sunday afternoon, plus a 0.8 and 1.39 million for Pistons-Warriors (+19%) and 998,000 for Raptors-Magic last Friday night (-11%).
