The WNBA followed up its most-watched opening round of the playoffs with a pair of near highs to start the second.
The opening round of the WNBA Playoffs averaged 1.30 million viewers across ESPN/ABC, Prime Video and USA Sports, up 37% from last year (944K) and the highest average on record, surpassing the previous mark of 1.11 million in 2024. Like the 2024 postseason, this year’s first round featured a healthy Caitlin Clark, who missed last year’s playoffs due to injury.
Clark and the Fever played in the most-watched game of the opening round, as their winner-take-all Game 3 loss to the Aces averaged 2.25 million on USA Network and CNBC, as previously reported.
The other opening round Game 3, Wings-Valkyries on ESPN2 Friday night, averaged 1.2 million — up 28% from Mercury-Liberty in the same window last year (939K).
Shifting to the semifinals, Sunday’s Liberty-Dream Game 1 averaged 1.2 million on ABC, down 14% from Fever-Aces — sans an injured Clark — last year (1.4M). Aces-Valkyries Game 1 followed with a combined 1.12 million on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (1.01M) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics (111K), up 57% from Mercury-Lynx on ESPN last year (716K).
Those two games ranks as the second and third most-watched Game 1 of a semifinal series (dates back to 2016), behind last year’s Fever-Aces. Note that only four semifinal openers have aired on broadcast television (albeit all opposite the NFL) — this year’s pair, and one each on ABC in 2024 and 2025. (Another semifinal Game 1 was scheduled to air on ABC in the 2020 “bubble,” but was postponed due to COVID.)
Overall, the games rank as the seventh and eighth most-watched semifinal games, behind six last year — all five between the Aces and Fever and Game 2 between the Mercury and Lynx (1.46M). If one were to include the old best-of-three conference finals, which the best-of-five semifinal round replaced in 2016, they still rank as the seventh and eighth most-watched in the round since 2002.
The standard caveats regarding changes in Nielsen methodology still apply, but viewership is so much higher than even just the recent past that those changes are unlikely to make any difference. Just three years ago, the semifinal round opened with 394,000 viewers for Sun-Liberty on ESPN and 182,000 for Wings-Aces on ESPN2.
