The Knicks’ title run produced another NBA viewership milestone, as their ring night — and LeBron James’ Sixers debut — set an Opening Night mark.
Tuesday’s Sixers-Knicks NBA Opening Night game averaged 7.71 million viewers on NBC across a Nielsen-measured linear audience (5.98M) and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics (1.7M), officially marking the largest Opening Night NBA audience on record, excluding the lockout-delayed 2011-12 season that began on Christmas Day.
The previous high for a traditional Opening Night was 7.35 million for Heat-Celtics on TNT in 2010, which marked James’ debut with the Miami Heat. Sixteen years later, this year’s game also marked James’ debut with a new team, the 76ers.
Philadelphia’s win, which peaked with 9.1 million in the 9:45 PM ET quarter-hour, also delivered the NBA’s largest non-Christmas regular season audience since March 1999 — when NBC averaged 8.37 million for Lakers-Jazz.
Note that out-of-home viewing was not included in Nielsen estimates until 2020 or fully accounted for until 2025, that this is only in the second year of a new Nielsen methodology integrating “Big Data” from smart TVs, set-top boxes and first party data with its traditional panel, and that Nielsen has recently tweaked its measurement to better account for co-viewing of games. It is a virtual lock that Heat-Celtics in 2010 would have ranked higher under current methodology.
Compared to last year’s double-overtime Rockets-Thunder Opening Night game, viewership increased 32% from 5.85 million.
The Thunder-Spurs nightcap averaged 4.85 million across Nielsen (3.89M) and Adobe Analytics (959K), down 5% from abbreviated coverage of Warriors-Lakers last year (5.11M). Oklahoma City’s blowout win trails only that game as the most-watched late window on Opening Night. Prior to last year, the high water mark was 4.30 million for Mavericks-Lakers on TNT in 2012, another figure that would be higher under present-day methodology.
The primetime Opening Night games averaged 6.4 million (5.04M per Nielsen, 1.38M per Adobe), up 14% from last year (5.61M) and surpassing 2010 (5.7M) as highest on record for the traditional Opening Night doubleheader. Beyond the Nielsen-related caveats, note that Opening Night games primarily aired on cable prior to the current NBA media rights deal.
In addition to the usual primetime games, NBC aired a weekday matinee on Opening Night this season, as Celtics-Pistons averaged 2.52 million (1.98M per Nielsen, 534K per Adobe). That is the largest audience for a weekday afternoon regular season game, excluding holidays, with the obvious caveat being an extremely small sample size. ESPN carried a 5 PM ET matinee on Thanksgiving Eve last season between the same two teams, averaging 1.68 million. ESPN and TNT also aired a handful of weekday afternoon games in the 2020 “bubble.”
Beyond the NBA, NBC averaged 2.3 million for a Pirates-Mets MLB Opening Day matinee in March, which aired in an earlier timeslot and competed with other games.
Celtics-Pistons was preempted on NBC affiliates in at least some markets, though NBC said Tuesday that the game aired either on NBC or alternate stations in “99% of U.S. households.” As one might expect given the timeslot and preemptions, Celtics-Pistons was the least-watched Opening Day NBA game since Bucks-Nets on TNT in 2021 (2.20M).
Even with the matinee game included, the three-game average of 5.1 million trails only last year as the highest for the NBA’s traditional Opening Day since 2010.
