The first year of the new NBA media rights deal delivered a sizable increase in viewership.
The 2025-26 NBA regular season averaged 1.78 million viewers across the league’s primary media partners ESPN/ABC, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video (including Adobe Analytics for NBC games) — up 16% from last year on ESPN/ABC and TNT, with that increase growing to 35% when including NBA TV. (NBA TV carried fewer games this season and thus brought down the average less than in prior years.)
The 35% increase for the NBA is on the high end of a general rise in sports viewership, including a 19% gain for the men’s college basketball regular season and a 10% increase for last year’s NFL regular season.
This season was officially the most-watched on the league’s primary broadcast partners in seven years, and the most-watched across all networks in 13. (Note that Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, only began doing so in 100 percent of markets a year ago, and is mere months into a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes generally skew comparisons to past years.)
NBCUniversal led the way with an average of 2.8 million viewers for its game windows, up 109% from the equivalent telecasts last season. NBC primarily aired games on Sunday and Tuesday nights. Last season, games in those windows aired on ESPN and TNT respectively.
The 11 “Sunday Night Basketball” games on NBCU — most of which aired on Telemundo in addition to NBC and Peacock — averaged 3.4 million, the highest for any NBA telecast window since ABC’s “NBA Saturday Primetime” in the 2015-16 season. The “Coast 2 Coast Tuesday” regional slate averaged 2.6 million, up 99% from last year’s equivalent national doubleheaders on TNT.
Fueled primarily by the NBC slate, the NBA generated 19 audiences in excess of 3.0 million viewers this season — the most in a single year since 2012-13. Overall, 57 telecasts averaged at least two million, the most since the lockout-shortened 2011-12 campaign.
Most-watched NBA games, 2025-26 regular season
ABC averaged 2.3 million for its slate of Saturday and Sunday games, down from 2.5 million last year. The network’s slate was impacted by news events, including one on January 24 that directly resulted in the postponement of a scheduled Warriors-Timberwolves game. That telecast was made up later in the season with the addition of Pistons-Timberwolves.
It was also impacted by the absence of Warriors G Stephen Curry, who missed all four of Golden State’s ABC games after Christmas. Three of those games aired in the “NBA Saturday Primetime” window, which as previously noted had its least-watched season with 2.22 million (-21%). ABC’s “NBA Sunday Showcase” window made up some of the shortfall with its most-watched season in three years (2.56M, +20%).
ESPN averaged 1.4 million for its games, up from last year (1.3M), with the combined average across ESPN/ABC being 1.9 million — up 11% from last year (1.7M) and the company’s highest since 2018-19.
In this past weekend’s regular season finales, ESPN averaged 1.66 million for Nuggets-Spurs and 1.28 million for Magic-Celtics. Those games aired in primetime and largely avoided the final round of the Masters. Last year’s regular season finales aired in afternoon windows directly opposite the Masters, with Clippers-Warriors at 1.55 million and Pistons-Bucks at 797,000.
Finally, newcomer Prime Video averaged 1.00 million for its 67-game slate, including 1.09 million for the 53 windows that can be directly compared to last year — down 2% from last year’s equivalent windows. The 14 additional windows largely consisted of lesser-watched afternoon matinees, the most-watched of which was Spurs-Nuggets on Final Four Saturday at 960,000. Prime has global NBA rights and those afternoon windows correspond with primetime in Europe.
As is typical for sports on streaming services, viewership among younger demographics outpaced the overall average, with the 53 comparable windows up 11% in adults 18-34, 20% in 18-49 and 16% in 25-54 compared to last year. That led to Prime having a median age nearly ten years younger than the other NBA broadcasters (47, compared to 56), though it should be noted that NBC’s presumably young-viewing streaming viewership is not measured by Nielsen.
The first streaming service to carry a full season-package of NBA games, Prime Video trailed both of last year’s cable-exclusive packages on ESPN and TNT (both 1.3M). The last time TNT averaged a similar audience for its regular season coverage was more than 25 years ago in 2000-01 (1.09M), and that was an outlier year for the network — which averaged 1.20 million the season before and 1.21 million the season after.
There is notable precedent for the first year of a streaming-exclusive package underperforming the historical average before recovering in subsequent years. Prime Video’s first season of “Thursday Night Football” in 2022 was the least-watched in nearly a decade, but viewership has steadily risen in the years since — and last season was the most-watched of the “TNF” package.
Figures for Prime Video’s first postseason telecasts, Tuesday’s NBA Play-in Tournament games, will be available Thursday at the earliest.
