Pairing the league’s highest-profile players and teams, the WNBA debut of “Sunday Night Basketball” delivered one of the league’s largest audiences in 25 years.
In the first WNBA edition of NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball,” Fever-Aces averaged 2.64 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (1.4 rating, 2.46M viewers) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics — marking the largest audience of the WNBA season and the league’s second-largest regular season audience since 2000. Officially, only last year’s Sky-Fever opening weekend game on ABC averaged more viewers (2.70M).
Indiana’s blowout win, which peaked at 2.8 million in the 10:30 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the third-largest WNBA audience overall since 2000 — trailing the aforementioned Sky-Fever game last year and the 2024 WNBA All-Star Game on ABC (3.44M).
Note that this is the first WNBA season since Nielsen began integrating “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel, and the second since the company expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets in the lower 48 states. It is likely that a number of games from the prior two seasons would have ranked higher under the same conditions.
Viewership surpassed the previous season-high of 2.56 million for a Saturday night Fever-Liberty game on CBS in June. It also easily surpassed the same Fever-Aces matchup the previous Sunday, a game that aired on cable in which neither Caitlin Clark nor A’Ja Wilson played (1.55M).
Fever-Aces was the first of two WNBA games on NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball” franchise, as the network’s “Sunday Night Baseball” was on hiatus due to the All-Star break. The network will also air Fever-Sky in the Sunday night window on August 23, when NBC will cede its usual baseball slot to ESPN’s MLB Little League Classic.
Of the eight “Sunday Night Baseball” games on NBC during the first half of the MLB season, only two averaged a larger audience than Fever Aces — an abbreviated Yankees-Red Sox game following the PGA Tour Travelers Championship (4.0M) and Mets-Phillies following the U.S. Open in June (3.0M). The previous week’s “Sunday Night Baseball” game, Padres-Dodgers, averaged 2.3 million.
Compared to NBC’s 11 “Sunday Night Basketball” games during the NBA season, Fever-Aces topped only one — Timberwolves-Celtics opposite the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments (2.4M).
NBC is averaging 1.5 million viewers for its four WNBA games so far this season, the highest average of any network, with the caveat that the other networks have carried more games. 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.
Earlier Sunday night, ESPN averaged a 0.5 rating and 965,000 viewers for Sky-Wings on “Women’s Sports Sundays,” ranking second out of the four WNBA games in the network’s new Sunday night window.
In other weekend WNBA action, ABC averaged a 0.7 and 1.18 million for Liberty-Lynx on Saturday and CBS drew a 0.6 and 1.12 million for Fire-Dream later in the afternoon.
