The Indiana Fever played in front of their largest audience yet on Sunday night.
Sunday’s Fever-Sky WNBA regular season game averaged 3.31 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (1.8 rating, 3.09M viewers) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics, marking the largest WNBA regular season audience since the league’s opening weekend of play in June 1997 — also on NBC (Liberty-Sparks: 5.04M; Sting-Mercury: 3.59M).
Indiana’s blowout win, which peaked with 3.82 million viewers, ranks fourth among all WNBA telecasts behind the aforementioned 1997 games and the 2024 All-Star Game on ABC (3.44M). Fever G Caitlin Clark has now played in three of the six most-watched WNBA games on record, with Fever-Sky joining her two All-Star game appearances in 2024 and 2026.
(For all historical comparisons, note that Nielsen did not begin tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020, did not do so in 100% of markets in the lower 48 states until 2025, and is about a year into a new methodology that integrates “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes with its traditional panel.)
Fever-Sky was the second WNBA edition of NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball,” both occurring in off weeks for the network’s MLB “Sunday Night Baseball” package. This past weekend, NBC was unable to carry “Sunday Night Baseball” in its usual primetime window because of the MLB Little League Classic, which traditionally airs on Sunday nights and contractually belongs to ESPN. The WNBA game comfortably topped the Braves-Brewers contest, which drew 2.0 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.)
Among the regular season games on NBC’s new Sunday night baseball and basketball packages, Fever-Sky ranks eighth behind four NBA and three Major League Baseball games. Each of the games to fare better featured the Lakers, Knicks, Yankees or Dodgers. (The NBA playoff editions of “Sunday Night Basketball,” as one would expect, would bump most of those regular season games out of the top ten.)
Largest regular season “Sunday Night” audiences on NBC since end of NFL season
The game was the seventh and final of the regular season on NBC. The network averaged 1.75 million viewers for its WNBA regular season windows, which it said is up 35% from comparable coverage last year. NBC will finish its WNBA season with Game 1 and Game 4 of the WNBA Finals.
Sunday’s game was the second of a back-to-back for the Fever, who played Saturday evening against the Liberty on Prime Video. Figures for that game will be provided when available.
With one more game left before they take a three-week break for the FIBA World Championship, and with five games total remaining in the regular season, the Fever have this season alone delivered eight of the 12 largest WNBA audiences since 2000. Clark has played in nine, including the All-Star Game.
There will be no more Fever games on the major broadcast networks ABC, NBC or CBS until the playoffs, but the team does have two more games on ION, one on ESPN and one on USA Network.
