The NBA’s new Play-in Tournament looks to be a balm for a lower regular season.
Tuesday’s Wizards-Celtics NBA game, part of the league’s inaugural Play-in Tournament, averaged a 1.5 rating and 2.50 million viewers on TNT — marking the largest NBA audience on any network since Nets-Warriors on ABC February 13 (2.56M) and the league’s largest audience on cable since Christmas Day. For TNT, it was the most-watched game since Opening Night. (Keep in mind that excludes the March 7 All-Star Game, which averaged 5.9 million.)
Earlier in the night, Hornets-Pacers averaged a 0.8 and 1.39 million. While not nearly as big a draw as Wizards-Celtics, the Pacers’ blowout win still beat every other TNT game since Nets-Lakers on February 18 (1.94M), again excluding the All-Star Game.
With an average of 2.0 million viewers, the play-in doubleheader outperformed TNT’s regular season average by 60 percent. By comparison, last year’s single play-in game — Grizzlies-Blazers on ABC — averaged 1.92 million.
As for the regular season, games on ABC, ESPN and TNT averaged 1.34 million viewers — down 17% from last year’s pre-hiatus average (1.62M). The gap is narrower including last year’s “seeding games” in the Walt Disney World “bubble,” which averaged 1.20 million. Play-in games do not count toward the regular season averages.
The regular season decline is less pronounced than that of last year’s months-delayed postseason, which sank 37%, though that is to be expected given the league’s return to its usual months of operation. It is in-line with the rest of television, with primetime NBA games down 13% and the rest of primetime television down 14%.
The regular season extending into May — usually a month when the playoffs are in full swing — did not have a negative impact on the ratings. Viewership for games in May was 19% higher than for games in April. By comparison, viewership in April was up just 12% over March, when the NBA is overshadowed by the NCAA Tournament.
25 of the 167 national windows were fully exclusive (13 on TNT and 12 on ABC). 62 other windows were exclusive in one of the participating markets. 25 windows were blacked out in one of the participating markets, including nine Laker telecasts that were blacked out in Los Angeles (and available solely on Spectrum SportsNet). On several occasions, a game was exclusive in one market and blacked out in the other (TNT’s Knicks-Lakers game earlier this month, for example, was exclusive in New York and blacked out in L.A.). The Play-in games are fully-exclusive.
[Nielsen estimates for the play-in games from Turner Sports]
