NBA viewership took a big hit Tuesday night thanks to scheduling chaos, and not just its own. Plus: record viewership for the NCAA women’s volleyball final, recent college hoops viewership, and more.
NBA replacement game hits low opposite NFL makeup games
Tuesday’s Pacers-Heat NBA regular season game — which was originally scheduled for TNT, dropped in favor of Wizards-Nets, and then moved back to TNT after Wizards-Nets was postponed — averaged just 393,000 viewers opposite rescheduled NFL games Tuesday night, marking the least-watched NBA game on ESPN, ABC or TNT since ESPN drew just 377,000 for Bulls-Grizzlies opposite a rescheduled NFL playoff game in 2017.
Despite the extremely weak lead-in, the Suns-Lakers nightcap pulled a much healthier 1.46 million.
Compared to TNT’s final doubleheader of last year, Pacers-Heat sank 53% from Bucks-Heat (837K) and Suns-Lakers jumped 27% from Pelicans-Suns (1.15M).
Record audience for NCAA women’s volleyball title game
The NCAA women’s volleyball championship (Nebraska-Wisconsin) averaged a 0.6 rating and 1.19 million viewers on ESPN2 last Saturday night, marking the largest audience for the event since it began airing on the ESPN networks. Viewership jumped 71% from last season’s title game, which took place in April (696K), and up 119% from the previous December edition in 2019 (533K).
Viewership also jumped for the semifinals, which averaged 728,000 viewers — up 50% from last season and up 20% from ’19. The full tournament averaged 369,000 viewers, up 45% from last season and up 42% from 2019.
Kentucky-UNC up big from same matchup last year
Last Saturday’s Kentucky-North Carolina college basketball game, part of the truncated CBS Sports Classic, averaged a 1.1 rating and 1.78 million viewers on CBS — up 22% in ratings and 38% in viewership from the teams’ meeting in the same event last year, which aired in an earlier window and faced college football (0.9, 1.30M).
The game is virtually tied with Kentucky-Duke in the Champions Classic (1.78M) as the second-most watched college basketball game this season. Gonzaga-Duke drew 2.79 million on ESPN Thanksgiving week.
In other college basketball action, ESPN said this week that viewership for its women’s games has increased 132% from last year and 74% from 2019. The top game of the season-to-date was UCLA-UConn on ABC December 11, which averaged a 0.55 rating and 839,000 viewers — the largest audience for a women’s regular season game since 2017.
Plus: MLS Cup, Liga MX, UEFA, NHL
The MLS Cup (Portland-NYCFC) averaged a 0.7 rating and 1.14 million viewers on ABC earlier this month, marking the most-watched MLS Cup on a single network since FOX drew 1.56 million for the 2018 game (Atlanta-Portland) and the fifth-most watched ever on the ESPN networks. UniMas and TUDN chipped in 364,000, down from last year (459K). The combined audience of 1.50 million slipped from last year’s mark of 1.53 million. … The second leg of this month’s Liga MX Apertura final (Cruz Azul-Santos) averaged 2.4 million viewers on Univision and TUDN, on par with last year (UNAM-Leon) and the most-watched club soccer match since the finale of the Clasura season earlier this year. LigaMX delivered eight of the ten largest club soccer audiences this year. … The group stage of the UEFA Champions League averaged 429,000 viewers across the Univision family of networks, up 23% from last year and the largest single-network audience ever at this stage of the tournament. … The most recent NHL game on TNT (Kraken-Ducks on December 15) averaged 236,000 viewers, down 31% from Avalanche-Blackhawks on NBCSN in an earlier window two years ago (344K). TNT did not have a game this past week due to the NHL’s slew of postponements, thus missing out on what would have been its biggest AEW wrestling lead-in yet (1.02M).
[Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily, network PR]
