The Fever has yet to break in the WNBA, which saw another one of its largest audiences in more than a quarter-century last weekend.
Last Saturday’s Liberty-Fever WNBA regular season game averaged a 1.4 rating and 2.58 million viewers on CBS, marking the league’s third-largest regular season audience since 2000 — trailing only Fever-Aces on NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball” the previous week (2.64M across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics) and Sky-Fever on ABC the opening weekend of last season (2.70M).
Indiana’s win, which peaked with 3.09 million, delivered the fourth-largest WNBA audience of any kind since 2000 — behind the two aforementioned games and the 2024 WNBA All-Star Game (3.44M). The Fever have played in three of the top five and four of the top seven just this season alone, with a previous CBS matchup against the Liberty ranking fifth (2.56M) and the season opener against Dallas on ABC placing seventh (2.49M).
(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 some games from the prior two seasons would have ranked higher under the same conditions.)
Each of the 13 largest WNBA audiences in the past 25 years has involved Fever G Caitlin Clark in some way, including 11 Fever games, the 2024 All-Star Game and the 2024 WNBA Draft in which she was picked first overall.
Most-watched WNBA games, past 25 years
In other action involving the Fever, a matchup against the Valkyries last Wednesday night averaged a 0.7 and 1.14 million on USA Network — surpassing Fever-Sparks a week earlier (1.04M) as the most-watched game on the first-year rightsholder. Two nights later, ION averaged a 0.6 and 1.02 million for regional action featuring Wings-Fever, trailing only Valkyries-Fever in May (1.09M) as the network’s most-watched game of the season.
Elsewhere in the league, ABC averaged a 0.6 and 975,000 for Sparks-Wings and CBS a 0.5 and 792,000 for Sky-Dream on Sunday, with the latter game fully airing opposite the FIFA World Cup Final.
