The WNBA heads into the playoffs after its most-watched regular season — and regular season game — since 2008.
Sunday’s Storm-Aces WNBA regular season game averaged a 0.52 rating and 852,000 viewers on ABC, marking the largest WNBA regular season audience in 14 years — since Candace Parker’s career debut against Phoenix in May 2008 (1.1M). The previous high was 804,000 for Mercury-Lynx a decade ago. Two of the three largest regular season audiences in the past decade came on consecutive Sundays, both of them for games between Las Vegas and Seattle.
In addition, it was the most-watched WNBA telecast of any kind since the clinching Game 5 of the 2017 WNBA Finals (Sparks-Lynx: 902K).
On a light summer Sunday, Las Vegas’ win trailed only the PGA Tour on NBC as the day’s most-watched sportscast on broadcast television. Keep in mind that NASCAR, the NFL preseason and Major League Baseball each attracted larger audiences on cable.
The Sun-Lynx lead-in posted a 0.43 and 682,000, marking the fifth-largest regular season audience in the past decade.
The full WNBA regular season averaged 372,000 viewers across the ESPN family of networks, up 19% from last year and the league’s most-watched season since 2008. This year’s average is up 51 percent from 2019 (246K), the last year before ESPN expanded its WNBA schedule to include regular game windows on ABC.
As with all viewership milestones of late, it bears noting that out-of-home viewing is now incorporated into Nielsen viewership and had not been in 2019 or prior years.
(Nielsen estimates from ShowBuzz Daily 8.16, ESPN PR)
