The first meaningful game between LeBron James and Stephen Curry in three years delivered, as expected, for the NBA.
Wednesday’s Warriors-Lakers NBA game, part of the league’s inaugural Play-in Tournament, averaged 5.62 million viewers on ESPN — the league’s largest audience on cable, outside of the playoffs and All-Star Game, since a season-opening Celtics-Knicks Christmas Day game on TNT in 2011 (5.86M).
The Lakers’ narrow win, which peaked with 6.15 million viewers from 12:30-1 AM ET, delivered the third-largest audience of the NBA season — trailing a Mavericks-Lakers Christmas Day game on ESPN and ABC (7.01M) and the March 7 All-Star Game on TNT and TBS (5.94M).
Compared to last year’s months-delayed NBA Playoffs, Warriors-Lakers averaged more viewers than every game prior to the NBA Finals. The most-watched of those was Nuggets-Clippers Game 7 on ESPN last September, which averaged 5.43 million. It trailed every game of last year’s record-low NBA Finals, which bottomed out at 5.94 million.
Versus play-in games in other sports, Wednesday’s game outdrew both of the most-recent single-elimination Major League Baseball Wild Card games back in 2019 (Brewers-Nationals: 4.73M; Rays-A’s: 4.54M). It also topped each of this year’s “First Four” NCAA men’s basketball tournament games, the most-watched of which was UCLA-Michigan State at 3.15 million on TBS.
For the night, Warriors-Lakers won each of the key young adult demographics. Exact figures were not immediately available.
Earlier Wednesday, Spurs-Grizzlies averaged 2.29 million — the third-largest NBA audience on ESPN this season behind Warriors-Lakers and a Christmas Day Pelicans-Heat game (3.50M).
Eight of the ten most-watched NBA games this season were all played largely against the players’ wishes — six in December, prior to the union’s desired start date of January 22; the All-Star Game, which players largely opposed; and the one game in the Play-in Tournament, about which several star players groused.
Most-watched NBA games, current season
[Nielsen estimates from ESPN PR 5.20]
